Karen Allen Set to Lead Rattlestick Playwrights Theater's A SUMMER DAY; Opens 10/25

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater Artistic Director David Van Asselt and Managing Director Brian Long have announced that Karen Allen will star in the American premiere of Jon Fosse's A Summer Day, translated and directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde, which begins performances Wednesday, October 10 and opens Thursday, October 25 at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

A visit to an old friend sparks the memory of a visit years earlier and the mysterious disappearance of a loved one. Set in two time periods in the same idyllic house, A Summer Day evokes the nostalgia of the end of an affair, capturing love both in the moment and as a distant memory. Acclaimed Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, widely considered to be one of the world's greatest living playwrights, receives an American premiere with this deep meditation on the nature of loss.

Jon Fosse has truly become a Norwegian cultural export-of all his country's dramatists, only Ibsen has been staged more often. Fosse's writing has been translated into more than 40 languages, and his plays have been performed more than 750 times around the world. His plays include And never we'll be parted, Someone is going to come, A Summer Day, Autumn Dream, and I am the wind. Fosse won the International Ibsen Award in 2012.

Karen Allen was inspired to become an actor after seeing Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Theatre Laboratory in a performance of Apolcalypsis Cum Figuris in 1972. She attended George Washington University and studied and performed with the Washington Theatre Laboratory in Washington DC and co-produced performances at the Washington Project for the Arts for four years before moving to New York City to work in the theatre.

Ms. Allen portrayed Helen Keller in William Gibson's The Monday After the Miracle, directed by Arthur Penn at the Actor's Studio, the Spoleto Festival, the Kennedy Center, and on Broadway for which she won a Theatre World Award. She played Marjorie in William Mastrisimone's Extremities at the Westside Arts Theatre, and also appeared in productions of Miss Julie at the Actor's Studio, directed by Peter Stormare; The Country Girl, The Miracle Worker, and Speaking in Tongues at the Roundabout Theatre; The Glass Menagerie at the Longwharf directed by Nikos Psachoropolis, Beautiful Bodies at the Whole Theatre and has worked with the Williamstown Theatre Festival (Tennessee Williams: A Celebration, The Royal Family and The Glass Menagerie), Berkshire Theatre Festival, Shakespeare and Company (Rosalind in As You Like It), and Westport Country Playhouse (Temporary Help).

For the past several years she has been directing for theatre and has done two productions of Michael Weller's Moonchildren as well as Joan Ackerman's The Batting Cage. Ms Allen is on the faculty of the theatre department at Bard College and is a member of the Actor's Studio.

Her films include Animal House, The Wanderers, A Small Circle of Friends, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Shoot the Moon, Cruising, Until September, Starman, Animal Behavior, The Glass Menagerie (starring JoAnne Woodward; directed by Paul Newman), Backfire, Scrooged, The Sandlot, King of the Hill, Falling Sky, The Perfect Storm, In the Bedroom, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,and, most recently, White Irish Drinkers.