Transatlantic Liaison Extends Off-Bway Through April 15
By: BWW News Desk Mar. 14, 2006
Transatlantic Liaison,
Fabrice Rozie's new play about French existentialist writer Simone de
Beauvoir and her passionate, volatile love affair with American
novelist Nelson Algren has extended its Off-Broadway premiere through
April 15 at Theater Row's Harold Clurman Theater (410 West 42nd
Street). The show was initially scheduled to run through April 2.
Directed by John McLean (who has helmed many productions in France) the show features Elizabeth Rothan (winner of the Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum Award, Cymbeline, Top Girls in New York) as Simone de Beauvoir and Matthew S. Tompkins (three-time recipient of the Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum Award for Best Actor) as Algren, "the hard-living writer who lived on and wrote about Chicago's South Side, and with whom de Beauvoir had the most passionate, star-crossed affair of her life," according to press notes. The off-Broadway production reunites director McLean with Rothan and Tompkins, who starred in the play's U.S. premiere at Theatre Three in Dallas in 2003.
Rozié
has long been fascinated with the love life of Simone de Beauvoir, best
known as writer of the revolutionary, incendiary feminist essay, The Second Sex
(published in 1949). Beauvoir's lifelong sexual and intellectual
partnership with the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was twenty-years
in progress when, in 1947, she met and fell deeply in love with Nelson
Algren, the still under-appreciated writer best known for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm. The
play "provides insights into how Beauvoir forged her identity -- as an
artist, intellectual and woman of passion. This new play is Beauvoir's
story of love beyond conventions of marriage, or of adultery, sifting
details from her published letters to Nelson Algren and her novel
inspired by their relationship, The Mandarins. At her death
in 1986, Beauvoir asked to be buried beside Sartre at Montparnasse
wearing Algren's ring. Algren died alone in Sag Harbor, NY in 1981."
Presented Off-Broadway by Treetop Productions, Transatlantic Liaison
has scenic and lighting design by David Lovett; and features original
music by Areski Belkacem, a French composer best-known for his
collaborations with singer, writer and actress Brigitte Fontaine.
In addition to her major works The Second Sex, The Mandarins and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) edited the political journal "Les Temps Modernes" with Sartre. Her work, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, was published posthumously in 1998. Algren wrote works such as Never Come Morning and A Walk on the Wild Side in addition to The Man with the Golden Arm.
The
show runs Mondays, Wednesdays-Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 2 and
8pm; and Sundays at 3pm (no performances on Tuesdays). Tickets are $45.
For tickets, visit TicketCentral.com or call 212-279-4200.
Photo by Carol Rosegg
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