Theater Critic Peter Marks and Director Eric Tucker to Appear in Conversation at Folger Theatre

With Bedlam's Saint Joan concluding Folger Theatre's 2017/18 season, The Washington Post chief theater critic Peter Marks sits down with the production's celebrated director Eric Tucker for a lively theater talk on Wednesday, May 16 at 7:00pm. Marks and Tucker will discuss the innovative, stripped-down staging of George Bernard Shaw's classic Saint Joan, the success of Eric's Bedlam theater in New York, bringing Jane Austen to the stage (Folger's Sense and Sensibility), approaching Shakespeare and other classic authors for a modern audience, and more.

Tickets for this event are $20 and can be purchased by calling the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077 or by visiting www.folger.edu.

There will be an audience Q&A following the conversation.

Saint Joan will play at Folger Theatre from May 12 through June 10, 2018. Tickets are available online at www.folger.edu/theatre or by calling the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077.

Joan of Arc, from peasant stock, fights for her country and defeats the English at Orleans. She is captured and taken prisoner in Burgundy, and brought before a church court who try her as a witch and burn her at the stake all before the age of nineteen. Depicted as neither witch, saint, nor madwoman in Shaw's retelling-Joan of Arc is but an illiterate farm girl whose focus on the individual rocks the church and state.

Peter Marks joined The Washington Post as its chief theater critic in 2002. Prior to that he worked for nine years at The New York Times, on the culture, metropolitan and national desks, and spent about four years as its off-Broadway drama critic.

Eric Tucker is the Artistic Director of Bedlam in New York. He was voted Wall Street Journal Director of the Year, 2014. Off-Broadway: Bedlam's Sense and Sensibility (Off-Broadway Alliance Award; Lucille Lortel Award nomination, Best Director; Drama League Award nomination, Best Revival); A Midsummer Night's Dream (Drama League Award nomination, Best Revival; Wall Street Journal Best Classical Production), Bedlam's Saint Joan (Off-Broadway Alliance Best Revival, 2014), Bedlam's Hamlet; Tina Packer's Women of Will, The Belle of Belfast. Bedlam: Dog Park, New York Animals (world premiere by Steven Sater and Burt Bacharach), Twelfth Night and what You Will, Sense and Sensibility, The Seagull (Wall Street Journal's Best Classical Production, 2014), Saint Joan and Hamlet (NYC, DC, Boston, Elliott Norton Outstanding Visiting Production and Outstanding Ensemble, Boston Globe's Top Ten). Additional work includes productions at: Central Square Theatre: Copenhagen; Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Kirk: The Libertine (IRNE nomination, Best Director); Stella Adler Theatre: Hamlet (with William Hurt); The Actors' Gang: Mate; Macbeth (Best Overall Production and Best Director nominations, LA Weekly).

About Bedlam:

Bedlam is a NYC-based not-for-profit theater company under the leadership of artistic director Eric Tucker and managing director Kimberly Pau Boston. Founded in 2012, Bedlam received instant recognition for its production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, in which only four actors played over 25 characters. Additional past shows include Sense & Sensibility, Peter Pan, The Seagull, Dead Dog Park, New York Animals, Hamlet and two productions of Twelfth Night that ran in rep with each other. Bedlam's productions have been noted as Ben Brantley's Critics' Picks for The New York Times on six occasions, and been included on The New York Times' Top Ten Best Show Lists twice, as well as those of The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. The Wall Street Journal also named Eric Tucker Director of the Year in 2014.

Bedlam has won three Irne Awards, two Off Broadway Alliance Awards and an Obie Grant. Bedlam has also been nominated for two Lucille Lortel awards, a Drama League award and five Elliot Norton awards, winning for Outstanding Visiting Production and Best Ensemble for Saint Joan and Outstanding Visiting Production for Twelfth Night/What You Will. Bedlam also offers a free veteran outreach program and adult education workshops in acting, producing and directing. bedlam.org

About Folger Theatre and Folger Shakespeare Library:

Folger Shakespeare Library, opened in 1932, featured the first replica in North America of an Elizabethan theater, a 250-seat space designed to suggest the inn-yard playing spaces. Founders Henry and Emily Folger envisioned it as a place for the performance of plays in Shakespeare's style, and the first nationally televised broadcast of a Shakespeare play in the U.S. was Julius Caesar from the Folger stage in 1949. Director of Public Programs Janet Alexander Griffin established Folger atre in 1991 and has since, as Artistic Producer, produced more than twenty-five seasons of Shakespeare, other plays from the period, and new works, including commissions, inspired by the period. Folger atre premiered the original Shakespeare for My Father, Lynn Redgrave's reminiscence of her theatrical family, as well as Roger Rees' What You Will; co-produced Teller and Aaron Posner's magical Macbeth, released on video; was the first Washington venue to present a production from Shakespeare's Globe from London; and has collaborated with the Classical atre of Harlem, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Guthrie, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and other theaters across the country.

Since 1991, Folger Theatre has been honored by the Helen Hayes Awards with 30 awards and 147 nominations for excellence in acting, direction, design, and production-including the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Play in 2007 for Measure for Measure, 2011 for Hamlet (a year in which all three of Folger's theatrical productions were nominated in that category), 2013 for The Taming of the Shrew, and most recently, for the 2016 staging of Sense and Sensibility (which garnered four Helen Hayes Awards).

Folger Shakespeare Library is a renowned center for scholarship, learning, culture, and the arts. Home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection and a primary repository for research material from the early modern period (1500-1750), Folger Shakespeare Library is an internationally recognized research library offering advanced scholarly programs in the humanities; a national leader in how Shakespeare is taught in grades K-12; and an award-winning producer of cultural and arts programs -theatre, music, poetry, exhibits, lectures, and family programs. A gift to the American people from industrialist Henry Clay Folger, Folger Shakespeare Library-located one block east of the U.S. Capitol-opened in 1932 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Learn more at www.folger.edu.

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