Legendary Actress Frances SternhagenTo Be Featured In Horovitz Play and Public Interview

Celebrated Actress
Frances Sternhagen
To Be Featured in Horovitz Play and Public Interview

Celebrated actress and two-time Tony Award-winner Frances Sternhagen will be joining the confluence of artists and audiences for Florida Stage's 5th Annual 1st Stage New Works Festival. Ms. Sternhagen will be featured in a staged reading of legendary playwright Israel Horovitz' new play Beverley on Saturday, February 5, 2011. On Friday, February 4, in place of the Festival's usual Keynote speech, Ms. Sternhagen will take part in what is being called "A Conversation with Frances Sternhagen." Florida Stage Producing Director Louis Tyrrell will conduct a public interview with Sternhagen on stage in the Persson Hall at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. The Florida Stage 1st Stage New Works Festival takes place February 3-6, 2011. Tickets and packages for all Festival events are available online at www.floridastage.org or by calling the box office at (561) 585-3433.

Sternhagen was elected head of the Drama Club "after silencing a giggling college crowd at a campus dining hall with her interpretation of a scene from Richard II, playing none other than Richard himself." She studied at the Perry Mansfield School of the Theatre, and New York's Neighborhood Playhouse.

Sternhagen started her career teaching acting, singing and dancing to school children at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and first performed herself in 1948 at a Bryn Mawr summer theater in The Glass Menagerie and Angel Street. She went on to work at Washington's Arena Stage Group from 1953-54, then had her Broadway debut in 1955 as Miss T. Muse in The Skin of Our Teeth. The same year she had her Off-Broadway debut in Thieves' Carnival and her TV debut in "The Great Bank Robbery" on Omnibus (CBS). By the following year she had won an Off-Broadway Obie Award for "Distinguished Performance (Actress)" in The Admirable Bashville (1955-56).

She has won two Tony Awards, one for "Best Supporting Actress (Dramatic)" in 1974 for the original Broadway production of Neil Simon's The Good Doctor based on Chekhov stories (which also won her a Drama Desk Award for "Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play"); and the second in 1995 for the revival of The Heiress, based on the Henry James novella. She has been nominated for Tony Awards five additional times, including for her roles in the original Broadway casts of Equus (1975) and On Golden Pond (1979), as well as for Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1972), the musical Angel (1978) which was based on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, and the 2002 revival of Paul Osborne's Morning's at Seven.

Her best-known Off-Broadway role was her feisty portrayal of the title character in 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Driving Miss Daisy, which was originated by Dana Ivey at Playwrights Horizons in New York. Sternhagen took over the role after the show moved to the John Houseman Theatre and played it for more than two years. Off-Broadway awards include two nominations for the Drama Desk Award for "Outstanding Actress in a Play": in 1998, for a revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Irish Repertory Theater, and in 2005, for the World War I drama Echoes of the War.

She also won "Distinguished Performance" Obie Awards for The Room and A Slight Ache (1964-65). In 1998, she won the Dramatists Guild Fund's "Madge Evans & Sidney Kingsley Award for Excellence in Theater." She starred in the 2005 revival of Edward Albee's Seascape, produced by Lincoln Center Theater at the Booth Theater on Broadway. She also appeared in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's All Over in 1971, with Colleen Dewhurst and Jessica Tandy. Her previous Broadway role was in the 2005 production of Steel Magnolias with Marsha Mason, Delta Burke, Christine Ebersole, Lily Rabe and Rebecca Gayheart.

Sternhagen made her film debut in 1967's New York City high school drama Up the Down Staircase, which starred Sandy Dennis. She has worked periodically in Hollywood since then. She had character roles in the 1971 Paddy Chayefsky's classic The Hospital, Two People (1973), and Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978). She appeared in Starting Over (1979) which starred Burt Reynolds; with Sean Connery in Outland (1981); and with Michael J. Fox in Bright Lights, Big City (1988). She played Farrah Fawcett's mother in See You in the Morning (1989), Richard Farnsworth's wife in Misery (1990), and John Lithgow's psychiatrist in Raising Cain (1992). Sternhagen starred in Frank Darabont's suspense thriller The Mist in 2007.

She may be best known to TV audiences as Esther Clavin, mother of John Ratzenberger's Boston postman character Cliff Clavin, on the long-running series Cheers, for which she received two Emmy Award nominations. She also played Millicent Carter on ER, Bunny MacDougal, mother of Trey, Charlotte's first husband on Sex and the City (another Emmy Award nomination), and in Law & Order, among other network dramas and sitcoms, and worked for many years in soap operas such as Another World, The Secret Storm and Love of Life. She played two roles on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live. She recorded a voiceover for a May 2002 episode of The Simpsons ("The Frying Game").

In 2006, she guest-starred on TV's The Closer, playing Willie Ray Johnson, the supportive mother of lead character Brenda (played by Kyra Sedgwick. Sternhagen has appeared on twelve episodes of The Closer to date.

Now in its 5th year, the 1st Stage New Works Festival showcases great new works in their earliest incarnations. The plays selected can be considered works-in-progress, and are in various stages of development.

The plays are cast with professional actors, who are led through 12 hours of rehearsal by noted local directors and dramaturges. Often the plays are changed and revised dramatically. The culmination of all the work is then presented as staged readings and is followed by talkbacks with the audience.

The festival gives the playwright the opportunity to hear his or her words aloud, gain insight from the rehearsal process, and gauge audience response before working on another draft.

2011 1st Stage New Work Festival

BEVERLEY by Israel Horovitz
A love triangle among three 70+-year-olds... Beverley, who came to America from England as a war-bride; Zelly, her fisherman-husband and Archie, the Brit she jilted 53 years earlier. A romantic comedy set in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

LEVELING UP by Deborah Zoe Laufer
How do you straddle the fuzzy line between reality and virtual reality when you're playing video games 20 hours a day? Ian, Zan, and Chuck are two years out of college when the government comes looking for expert gamers to launch remote missiles.

POET by Kew Henry
Two muses, assigned to Edgar Allan Poe at his birth, compete for his talent and imagination. Throughout his life, these artistic demons, one the poet muse, the other the prose, haunt him to write through the power of their conflicting inspirations.

THE AMERICANS ACROSS THE STREET by Carter W. Lewis
Derek has a Pulitzer Prize, but he's tired of the world and all that inhabit it. His only source of pleasure is lurking alone on his porch, sipping scotch and accosting his neighbors with articulate rants. Then his distant sister arrives with her perplexing daughter in tow-a year later, there's cupcakes, a cannon or two, a dead fat lady, and an all encompassing moon.

BRILLIANT CORNERS by Andrew Rosendorf
Marshall is divorced, poor, and alone, except for his jazz music. He's paying alimony to an unsympathetic ex-wife, Carol. His son, Eli, returns home asking for tuition for college and his unstable daughter, Sarah, is demanding money she believes she is owed.

CAPTIVA by Christopher Demos-Brown
When a woman invites her family to their traditional island getaway to meet her fiancé, she hopes to renew old ties and find the imagined comfort of her youth. Instead, when everyone is trapped by a late season hurricane, their pent-up secrets and frustrations get loose in this dark comedy.

TIEMPO DE AMOR by John Herrera
Set in Havana and Tampa in the 1920s. A young woman is torn between her mad passion for an older man newly arrived from Spain and her loyalty to her controlling mother.

The schedule for the 1st Stage New Works Festival is as follows:

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2011

5:30-7pm: Opening Reception

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2011

1:30 pm: READING - Captiva by Christopher Demos-Brown
4:30 pm: READING - Leveling Up by Deborah Zoe Laufer
7:00 pm: A CONVERSATION WITH Frances Sternhagen
8:00 pm: READING - Poet by Kew Henry

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2011

11:00 am: READING - The Americans Across the Street by Carter W. Lewis
1:30 pm: READING - Brilliant Corners by Andrew Rosendorf
4:00 pm: PLAYWRIGHTING 101 WORKSHOP with Carter W. Lewis
7:00 pm: PLAYWRIGHTS PANEL
8:00 pm: READING - Beverley by Israel Horovitz

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2011

1:30 pm: READING - Tiempo De Amor by John Herrera
3:30 pm: Closing Reception

PLEASE NOTE: All events are ticketed.

Florida Stage is a member of the League of Resident Theatres, Theatre Communications Group, Florida Professional Theatre Association, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre and the National New Play Network, and works in association with Actors' Equity Association, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and United Scenic Artists.

Florida Stage develops and produces new plays in a passionate, intimate and caring environment, adhering to a standard of uncompromising excellence. We provide a safe harbor for theatre artists and audiences to share in stories of our humanity, a place where the sheer joy of creation and the Florida Stage Experience is paramount. We choose to provoke dialogue in our community and inspire people of different ages, ethnic and social backgrounds through our productions and our innovative educational programs.

Funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the county of Palm Beach and Florida Arts, with generous support from The Shubert Foundation, The Heckscher Foundation for Children, The Duane & Dalia Stiller Charitable Trust, Gulf Stream Lumber, Northern Trust Bank of Florida N.A., Fidelity Federal Bank & Trust, and hundreds of individuals and corporations.

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