Lea DeLaria and Charles Busch Star in One-Night-Only Reading of SIR PATIENT FANCY

Red Bull Theater today announced the cast for the next REVELATION READING, Aphra Behn's SIR PATIENT FANCY, directed by Leigh Silverman: Whitney Maris Brown, Charles Busch, Lea DeLaria, Zachary Fine, Gibson Frazier, Kendyl Ito, Kristolyn Lloyd, Cherie Corinne Rice, Austin Smith, Amelia Workman and more to be announced! This will take place on Monday March 25th at 7:30pm at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher Street, between Bleecker and Hudson Streets).

Sir Patient Fancy is a hypochondriac old fool with a young and beautiful second-wife Lucia. Now, if he would only stop interrupting her love affair with the dashing rake Wittmore, whom she would have married, were it not for the biggest obstacle of all: neither has any money. The theater's first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn, delivers a delicious farce in the tradition of Moliere's comic masterpiece, The Imaginary Invalid. With the kind of defiant women of her earlier play The Rover, and a character list that includes the likes of Lady Knowell and Sir Credulous Easy, Sir Patient Fancy was a runaway hit of the Restoration stage.

In 1660, Charles II returned from exile in France with two radical developments for the newly re-opened English theater: French neoclassicism and female performers on the stage. Theatrical tastes were changing; Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were the favorite revivals; Shakespeare's "fancy" and more open dramaturgy were less popular because Restoration audiences demanded an extremely realistic depiction of their society, defined by the aristocratic culture of the court. The prime example of this new realism, the introduction of the female performer, changed the very nature of spectatorship. The popularity of breeches roles in Restoration theater sprang from a very different impulse from that of the earlier all-male performance tradition. Now the interest was in seeing the legs of real women on stage, as well as more abundant fleshly exposures glimpsed during scenes of quite explicit sexuality - witness Lady Fancy and Isabella in "disordered" states of undress. The female body became an object of intense interest in its own right - both onstage and backstage - and created a new climate of celebrity for female performers, whose abilities as actresses often took second place to their status as cultural curiosities.

Aphra Behn (1640-89), the first professional female playwright, led a tumultuous and colorful life, both in and out of the theater. She left England soon after the restoration of Charles II for the South American colony of Surinam, which provided the setting for her novel, Oronooko; or, The Royal Slave, which in turn was adapted for the stage and remained popular throughout the 18th century. Returning to England, she may have entered into a fictitious marriage with someone named Behn, but by the mid-1660s she was serving the crown as a spy in Antwerp during the Dutch invasion of Surinam. On her return to England she was thrown into debtors' prison and appealed to the government for her back wages. After 1670, however, she emerged as a famous and influential poet and playwright, part of the elite milieu surrounding the court. Her best known plays are The Rover, The City Heiress, and The Feigned Courtesans, which was dedicated to her friend (and the King's mistress) the actress Nell Gwynn. Behn was re-discovered, in a sense, by Virginia Woolf's famous 1918 essay "A Room of One's Own:" "... all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

For tickets and more information about Revelation Readings, or any of Red Bull Theater's productions and programs, visit www.redbulltheater.com.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos

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