Video | The Last Goodbye Actor, Damon Duanno

Check out this video interview with The Last Goodbye Actor, Damon Duanno. 

[ ... ]

Special Feature | Famous Missourians

by Rachel Lerner-Ley, Dramaturg

Shirley dreams of becoming a famous artist—“the greatest artist that Missouri has ever produced.” To which John responds “would that be so difficult?” Shirley then spouts off a list of famous and influential people who got their start in Missouri.

Here’s a glimpse into the famous folks of the Show Me State that make their way into Fifth of July:

Mark Twain (author and wit): Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri and at the age of 4 moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri—a bustling town situated on the Mississippi River. It is in Hannibal that Clemens observed life along the Mississippi as well as the realities of slavery—two major themes of his later works. It is also in Hannibal that he began writing and drawing. His brother, Orion, owned the local newspaper, the Hannibal Journal, and Clemens became a frequent contributor.     

Betty Grable (actor and pin-up): Betty Grable was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She made her first film appearance at the age of 13 and made her way up the Hollywood ladder, appearing in musicals and comedies. She eventually rose to the top of the box office throughout the '40s. In 1943 she posed in a swimsuit and became the most popular pin-up of WWII. The picture has even made it into LIFE’s list of the "100 Photos that Changed the World." Her legs were insured for over $1 million, and Hugh Hefner has noted her as an inspiration for Playboy. She died of lung cancer in 1973.

Tennessee Williams (playwright): He may have been born in Mississippi and have family roots in Tennessee (hence the name), but Williams did in fact spend many of his “formative years” in Missouri. From the age of seven until his late teens, Williams was a resident of St. Louis, Missouri. Here he wrote his first essays and stories as well as found inspiration for several characters that would appear in his later masterpieces. He began writing plays while a student first at University of Missouri and then at Washington University, St. Louis.

Vincent Price (actor): Price was born and raised in St. Louis eventually going away to Yale to study Art History. He traveled Europe and became an actor. He is most well known for his (somewhat campy) appearances in horror films and for his spooky voice (he “raps” in Michael Jackson’s landmark song “Thriller”).  Later in life, he followed his passion for gourmet cooking and started his own line of cookbooks.

Harry S. Truman (President): Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri and grew up in Independence, Missouri. As a boy, he got to serve as a page at the DNC in Kansas City in 1900. He spent the majority of his young adult life in Missouri as a farmer and then went away to fight in WWI. He returned to Missouri and soon was elected a district judge, beginning a political career (as a Democrat) that would eventually lead him to the presidency.  

Gwen also gives two other Missourians a shout-out. She compares June’s persona in the 1960s  to these two ladies...

Ma Barker (outlaw): Born outside Springfield, Missouri, she married her husband in Aurora, Missouri. They moved to Oklahoma. Her sons became known as the “Bloody Barkers,” committing a series of kidnappings, robberies, and other crimes in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma throughout the '20s and '30s. Ma Barker is remembered in popular culture as being the ring leader of this gang of criminals, though recent evidence suggests quite the opposite. In 1977, Boney M. came out with a song called “Ma Baker” based on Ma Barker in which they call her “the meanest cat.”

Belle Starr (outlaw): Born in Carthage, MO, though she eventually moved to Texas after the outbreak of the Civil War.  She became an outlaw in the “Old West”—“the bandit queen” helping to organize and lead gangs that participated in horse stealing, bootlegging, and other profitable ventures. Later in life, after being released from jail, she took on a long line of various lovers. She was shot to death, possibly by one of her children.

And of course, there is one important Missourian very close to the play itself:

Lanford Wilson (playwright): Born in Lebanon, Missouri and growing up in the town of Ozark, Wilson points to his experience of the Mid-West as being a major inspiration of several of his plays.

[ ... ]

Video | Fifth of July Actor, Jennifer Mudge

Check out this video interview with Fifth of July actor, Jennifer Mudge!

[ ... ]

Video | Fifth of July Director, Terry Kinney

Check out this video interview with Fifth of July Director, Terry Kinney!

[ ... ]

Dramaturgy | Lanford Wilson and Circle Repertory Company

by Rachel Lerner-Ley, Dramaturg

Circle Repertory Company was founded in 1969 by playwright Lanford Wilson, director Marshall Mason, actor Tanya Berezin, and director Rob Thirkield. With little money—paying the rent out of their own pocket for the uptown crumbling loft that would serve as a theatre and offices until they got a permanent home in the '80s, the four founders created one of the original off-off broadway theatres that would come to be a major influence in the American Theatre and the creative home to some of American Theatre’s biggest names. The theatre closed its doors in 1996.  

“It was created out of the need from the artists to express themselves,” Mason pointed out in an 1999 NewsHour interview. “and at that point, Broadway was almost exclusively English: Harold Pinter and John Osborne, these guys were occupying the Broadway theaters. Off Broadway had become very commercial. It was running ‘Little Mary Sunshine’ and ‘The Fantastics,’ and that sort of thing…..A young American playwright had no place to go, and so we went to the little coffee shops—you know—down in the village. Most of it was down in the Village.” It was in one such coffee shop, Caffe Cino—a tiny place of  mismatched chairs, postered walls, and a killer espresso machine—that the four founders of Circle Rep. met in the early '60s and began the collaboration that would eventually lead to the creation of a theatre company.

Circle Repertory Theatre was established as “an on-going ensemble of artists—actors, directors, playwrights and designers—who would work together to create a living play.”

 The company was host to resident playwrights who wrote new plays inspired by and tailored for the company’s core of actors. The company held workshops for the actors, training them in voice, movement, and scene study. These workshops allowed the company to build a vocabulary so that everyone could contribute to the creation of the play. At Circle Rep, making a play was an all hands on deck, collaborative process.

Circle Rep. was the perfect artistic home for Wilson who confessed in a 1978 New York Times article, that he has a deep aversion to working alone: “A long time ago I was told that writing plays was a lonely business and I knew then that wasn’t for me. You’ll never catch me a hundred miles away from New York, cloistered in a cabin, pounding out the third act. I could as easily write in a closet. I know I can’t work away form the city. Eight years ago I found a house in Sag Harbor, made a fine writing room there, and have never written a word in it. It’s a kind of mild aversion to working alone that everybody at Circle Rep comes by honestly. We began working at Caffe Cino and La Mama, with everyone bumping elbows, and it never occurred to us to ask if we had good working conditions. At Circle Rep we bump each other around a lot….”

It is from such a bumping of elbows that Wilson’s Fifth of July emerged. Fifth was written entirely at Circle Rep. with five readings of five different full drafts occurring over several months, plus the readings of numerous other scenes that Wilson tried out by just grabbing actors as they passed by.

The actors at Circle Rep. were critical to Wilson’s process. He once reflected, “Sometimes you see something in an actor (a small, odd movement, a turn of voice) that suggests a whole character, someone you’ve know and wanted to write about….” He continues “I’ve always written for actors. ‘Whom do you write for?’ Actors. ‘But what audience do you write for?’ Anybody. One of the pleasures of being a playwright (count them on one hand) is watching an actor in the process of understanding, believing, the part.”

In the end, all the aspects of Fifth of July were Circle Rep derived: the direction, the acting, the designs, and even the song which Wes Hurley plucks out on his guitar throughout the play was composed by actor and company member Jonathan Hogan.

[ ... ]

Video | The Last Goodbye Audience Reactions

See what our first preview audience thought of The Last Goodbye!

[ ... ]