Long Wharf To Present Premiere Of Fugard's 'Victory'

 Long Wharf Theatre, under the leadership of Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Managing Director Joan Channick, is pleased to announce the addition of the Athol Fugard one-act play Valley Song to the 2008-09 season.

The show will be performed in tandem with the East Coast premiere of Fugard's newest work, Victory. Victory and Valley Song will run from January 14 through February 8 on the Mainstage.

Valley Song and Victory, written a decade apart, illuminate an ever-changing new South Africa.

In Valley Song, Veronica is caught between her own dreams of a singing career in Johannesburg and her grandfather's deep love for tradition and the "akkers" he's farmed for their livelihood.

In Victory, a botched robbery exposes the complicated relationship between Vicky and Lionel, the white teacher for whom her mother once kept house: though they were once like family, a deep chasm of age, race and privilege now divides them.

Over a career spanning more than half a century, Athol Fugard - described by Time magazine as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world" - has chronicled with poetry and humanity the struggles of his native South Africa.

Thirty-five years after Fugard's monumental collaboration Sizwe Banzi is Dead made its American premiere at Long Wharf Theatre, he returns with two stories of the dreams of youth and the ghosts of apartheid set against the backdrop of a small Karoo village.

LONG WHARF THEATRE, founded in 1965, is recognized as a leader in American theater, producing fresh and imaginative revivals of classics and modern plays, rediscoveries of neglected works and a variety of world and American premieres.

More than 30 Long Wharf productions have transferred virtually intact to Broadway or off-Broadway, including the 2005 production of BFE by Julia Cho, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Wit by Margaret Edson, The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer, and The Gin Game by D.L. Coburn.

Long Wharf has received New York Drama Critics Awards, Obie Awards, the Margo Jefferson Award for Production of New Works, a Special Citation from the Outer Critics Circle, and the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.