Overview
Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes plus one intermission
Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending tells the story of the passion of two outcasts—Lady Torrance, a storekeeper’s wife and daughter of a murdered Sicilian bootlegger and Val, a wandering guitar player—and their attempt to escape from a Southern Hell.
Set in a small town dry-goods store in the Deep South, Orpheus Descending is a toxic brew of racist violence, bigotry, misogyny, sexual passion and longing for liberation.
Maggie Siff (Billions, Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy) plays Lady Torrance and Pico Alexander (Catch 22, Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock and A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer) is Valentine Xavier.
Erica Schmidt, who adapted and directed Shakespeare’s Macbeth for seven schoolgirls entitled Mac Beth (“raucously exuberant”) and this season’s Lucy which she wrote and directed (“seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and …cleverly detailed”), stages, in her TFANA debut, this seldom-seen Williams masterpiece.
Cast
Maggie Siff
Lady Torrance
Pico Alexander
Valentine Xavier
Molly Kate Babos
Michael Cullen
Matt DeAngelis
Mary Glen Fredrick
Gene Gillette
Laura Heisler
Prudence Wright Holmes
Brian Keane
Julia McDermott
Ana Reeder
Kate Skinner
Fiana Tóibín
James Waterston
Dathan B. Williams
Media
Theatre for a New Audience Presents Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending"