The Guthrie Theater will kick off its 50th anniversary season with a three-play celebration of prolific British playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, whose adaptation of Yasmina Reza's Tony Award-winning comedy God of Carnage is playing on the Theater's McGuire Proscenium Stage through August 7, 2011. A Guthrie commission of Appomattox, a new play based on his original 2007 opera collaboration with composer Philip Glass, will be presented in the fall of 2012 alongside two of Hampton's other works, the titles of which will be announced at a later date.
Appomattox deals with the final week of the Civil War and the immediate aftermath of the treaty signed in April 1865, while also considering the fact that 100 years later, the root cause of the Civil War, the suppression of one race by another, had still not been satisfactorily addressed and is still, to this day, a more than contentious issue.
"Since the end of our successful
Tony Kushner Celebration in 2009, our audiences have been eagerly awaiting this announcement," said Dowling. "Christopher is an exciting, informative and innovative writer, and a supreme stylist of his generation. The wonderful theatricality and witty banter of his work will offer our audiences the same potential for discussion and engagement that they so enjoyed in our celebration of Tony."
"I have had great relations with the Guthrie and Minneapolis since the days of
Garland Wright," said Hampton, "and eagerly look forward to revisiting two of my earlier plays, as well as premiering a new play, which will be my first on an entirely American theme."
The Guthrie's unprecedented 2009 celebration of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
Tony Kushner featured productions on all three stages, including his much talked about world premiere The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (which recently concluded its New York run), the critically-acclaimed musical Caroline, or Change, and an evening of short plays, dubbed Tiny Kushner, which went on to play at Berkeley Rep in 2009 and London's
Tricycle Theatre in 2010.
Full details of the 2012
Christopher Hampton Celebration will be announced at a later date.
Christopher Hampton is a prolific British playwright, screenwriter and film director, whose adaptation of
Yasmina Reza's Tony Award-winning comedy God of Carnage is playing through August 7, 2011, on the McGuire Proscenium Stage at the Guthrie. His plays, musicals and translations have garnered four Tony Awards, three Olivier Awards, four Evening Standard Awards and the New York Theatre Critics Circle Award, while recognition for his film and television work has included an Academy Award, two British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards, a Writer's Guild of America Award, the Prix Italia and a Special Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Hampton is most famous for penning his 1987 Tony-nominated play Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the subsequent screenplay Dangerous Liaisons - for which he won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay - both based on the Pierre
Choderlos de Laclos novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Most recently, he garnered a 2007 Academy Award nomination for his screenplay adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement, which starred
James McAvoy and
Keira Knightley.
He also won two Tony Awards for his work on the 1995 musical Sunset Boulevard, including Best Book of a Musical (with
Don Black), and Best Original Musical Score - sharing lyrics credit with
Don Black and music by
Andrew Lloyd Webber - and joined Black in writing the lyrics and book for
Frank Wildhorn's Dracula, the Musical based on the
Bram Stoker novel.
His plays, which have been performed both in the West End and on Broadway, include Total Eclipse, The Philanthropist, Liaisons Dangereuses and Tales from Hollywood. He has translated
Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, Art, The Unexpected Man, Conversations After a Burial and Life x 3, as well as plays by Ibsen, Moliére and Chekhov. His work has also been seen at the
Royal Shakespeare Company, the Almeida and the
Royal National Theatre.
Hampton's television credits include "The Ginger Tree," "Hotel du Lac," "The History Man" and "Able's Will," and he has written the screenplays for Imagining Argentina, The Quiet American, The Secret Agent,
Mary Reilly, Carrington, Total Eclipse, Wolf at the Door, The Good Father, The Honorary Consul, Tales from the Vienna Woods and A Doll's House.
His screenplay A Dangerous Method will premiere this September at the Venice Film Festival. Based on Hampton's 2002 play The Talking Cure, itself based on the
John Kerr's book A Most Dangerous Method, the David Cronenberg-directed film looks at the turbulent relationship between fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung (
Michael Fassbender), his mentor
Sigmund Freud (
Viggo Mortensen) and Sabina Spielrein (
Keira Knightley), the troubled but beautiful young woman who comes between them.
The GUTHRIE THEATER (
Joe Dowling, Director) was founded by Sir
Tyrone Guthrie in 1963 and is an American center for theater performance, production, education and professional training. The Tony Award-winning Guthrie Theater is dedicated to producing the great works of dramatic literature, developing the work of contemporary playwrights and cultivating the next generation of theater artists. With annual attendance of nearly 500,000 people, the Guthrie Theater presents a mix of classic plays and contemporary work on its three stages. Under the artistic leadership of
Joe Dowling since 1995, the Guthrie continues to set a national standard for excellence in theatrical production and performance. In 2006, the Guthrie opened its new home on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, the Guthrie Theater houses three state-of-the-art stages, production facilities, classrooms and dramatic public lobbies.
www.guthrietheater.org
