World Premiere-Ladies&Not So Gentle Women-Gables' New Theatre
By: Beau Higgins Nov. 12, 2005
LADIES AND NOT SO GENTLE WOMEN
open wine bar, and an informal post-play reception with the cast and
playwright.Saturday December 3 - Press opening at 8 p.m.
Special final performance New Year's Eve December 31 at 8 p.m. Party
with cast and playwright after the show. $45 per person which will
be followed by dessert and a toast with the cast.December 8, 9, 10 at 8 p.m., 11 at 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. / December
15, 16, 17 at 8 p.m., 18 at 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. / December 21, 22,
23 at 8 p.m., 25 at 7 p.m. / December 28, 29, 30, 31 (closing) at 8
p.m. / Please note no shows December 24 or January 1.
Sundays - $40; Students - $10For more details please visit us at http://www.new-theatre.org Directed by Rafael de Acha With Kimberly Daniel, Patti Gardner, Lisa Morgan, Annemaria Rajala,
Aubrey Shavonn, and Tara Vodihn. Set design: Jesse Dreikosen, Lighting design: Eric Nelson
Costume design: Estela Vrancovich About the play and its playwright
Bessy Marbury (Kimberly Daniel) and her friends Elsie de Wolfe
(Patti Gardner) Anne Vanderbilt (Lisa Morgan) and Anne Morgan
(Aubrey Shavonn) provide a glimpse into the world of several famous
women of a time when the love that dares not speak its name
flourished behind damask-covered walls in the high society circles
of New York and Paris. The roles of Queen Victoria, Rudolph
Valentino, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Wharton, Cole Porter, Kate
Forsythe, and P.G. Wodehouse are played by Annemaria Rajala and Tara
Vodihn in this play with songs based on Alfred Allan Lewis book by
the same title.
of college appearing with Mae West in Diamond Lil. Soon after, he
wrote the NBC Peabody Award winning show, A Tribute to Eugene
O'Neill. O'Neill's widow later asked him to write a staged biography
of her husband, Gene, which was done as a companion piece to the
posthumous premiere of his one-act play, Huey, at Bath Arts Festival
and in London's West End. His play, Diplomatic Relations, was
performed all over the United States and filmed for television. A
Miami production starred Claudette Colbert and Brian Aherne. He has
written many television scripts for CBS Playhouse, The Doctors, and
Edge of Night as well as the cult Gothic serial Dark Shadows. He has
collaborated on books with Sylvia Sidney and Gloria Vanderbilt. He
has written eighteen books including several Book of the Month Club
and Woman Today book club selections. Among his works are: Miss
Elizabeth Arden, Man of the World, Three out of Four Wives, The
Evidence Never Lies, and Ladies and Not-So-Gentlewomen, from which
he adapted his play. The playwright on his play The obvious achievement of the Civil War was the emancipation of a
race. The slower and still subtler achievement of the century that
followed was the emancipation of a sex at a time in which men found
that their girls became the ladies and, ultimately, women. The world
would never be the same for either of the sexes. They were more
daring buccaneers than the robber barons to whom they were related
and more dramatic than the theatrical greats with whom they
associated both socially and professionally. My play's heroines bear such illustrious names as Vanderbilt,
Morgan, De Wolfe, and Marbury, all of them women who never rebelled
against the world into which they were fortunate enough to be born,
but who instead lightheartedly broke every one of its rules with
such finesse that they did not so much as chip a piece of its fine
china. Unlike Carrie Nation, chaining themselves to the pillars of
society was not their way. They simply called in the best architect
available and redesigned them. Bessy Marbury was the most powerful woman in the history of the
American theater. At the height of her career, she controlled over
75% of the plays produced anywhere in the United States. She
invented the talent agency and stroked the egos of her playwright
clients, who included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jerome Kern,
Cole Porter, P. G. Wodehouse, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham, and
Eugene O'Neill. She is also credited with devising and producing the
first modern American musical comedy, and, in so doing, liberating
Broadway from the schlag of Viennese operetta. Bessy's sponsorship
and love converted Elsie de Wolfe from an obscure social hanger-on
into a glamorous star of the theater and later into the first
professional interior decorator, making interior design one of the
first fields in which a woman could earn an income equal to that of
the men of the period. This play dramatizes their stories along with those of their
intimate friends Anne Morgan (daughter of J. P.) and Anne Vanderbilt
(whose step-son occupied all of Fisher Island as his private winter
home). It is set in those exciting periods they helped to change so
emphatically: the gay nineties, World War I, the roaring twenties,
and the beginning of the legendary New Deal.
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