Missouri-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
Lanford Wilson has been writing plays since the off-off-Broadway movement
began in New York in the 1960s. His first plays were produced at
Café Cino and the still-in-operation LaMamma Theater. A few of
Wilson’s plays made it to Broadway, and one, Fifth of July, will be seen here, in
the University of Illinois at Springfield Studio Theatre, in a production
directed by Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson that opens this week and runs April
1-3 and 8-10.
Fifth of July, set in
1977, takes place over a weekend in a Lebanon, Mo., farmhouse where several
friends from college days at Berkeley have met for a reunion. It’s
way up there on my list of favorite plays and was last seen here in a
Springfield Theatre Centre production in the 1980s directed by Mike Savage.
Originally produced off-Broadway at the Circle
Repertory Theatre in 1978, the play starred William Hurt as Ken Talley Jr.,
who has returned to his Missouri hometown after losing his legs in the
Vietnam War. When the play moved to Broadway in 1980, Hurt’s role was
taken on by Christopher Reeve and subsequently played by Richard Thomas.
Swoosie Kurtz won a Tony Award for her portrayal of an heiress who wants to
be a rock star.
The play is actually part of a trilogy Wilson wrote
about the Talley family. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Talley’s Folly, which takes
place at the family homestead in the 1940s. In that play, schoolteacher
Sally Talley is wooed by a St. Louis accountant. In Fifth of July, Sally is in her
seventies and the family matriarch. Shirley McConnaughay plays Sally in the
UIS production, which also features John McAdams, Brad Hammond, Shirene
Thomas, Anthony Wanless and Marie Pignon.
Fifth of July is a
perfect choice for UIS, an ensemble piece with great roles. Actors love
working on Wilson’s plays. He loves the characters he creates on the
page. These characters came of age during the protest years of the
’60s, and in this funny and poignant play we find them reminiscing
about the times and see how each has changed.
Go see Fifth of July on its opening weekend. You may want to see it twice.
The play begins at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. It does
contain mature situations and language and is not appropriate for children.
For ticket information, call 217-206-6160.
• Beating the release of the big-screen version
next fall, a stage adaptation of The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe begins a two-week run at
the Hoogland Center for the Arts in downtown Springfield. The Active
Creative Teen Theatre’s stage version of the revered C.S. Lewis
children’s book is directed by Molly Mathewson and runs April 8-10
and April 15-17.
Mathewson has such a natural talent for acting (seen
recently in Kari Anderson’s drama Born
with a Veil) and singing (she performs with her
dad, Mark Mathewson of WUIS-FM’s Bluegrass
Breakdown), that it will be interesting to see
what she does at the helm of a stage production.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2005.
