Electronic Press Kit · Electronic Press Kit TABLE OF CONTENTS Page 2 Production Info Page 3 Press Release Page 4 Who Gets To Play Mary Tyrone: A Historical Perspective Page 6 Sponsors

Electronic Press Kit

TABLE OFCONTENTS

Page 2Production InfoPage 3Press Release

Page 4Who Gets To Play Mary Tyrone:A Historical Perspective

Page 6Sponsors and Full Schedule

Pages 7–9Show Graphics

Over the course of one sultry day in 1912, the Tyrone family fi nd themselves drifting into a world where the past is the present and the present is haunted with guilty secrets.

Fort Point Theatre Channel • 15 Channel Center Street, Boston www.fortpointtheatrechannel.org

WaltersWest Project • 40 Norfolk Street, Bostonwww.facebook.com/LongDaysJourneyatHibernianHall

Page 5Cast and Production Team

CONTACT Amy S. West ([email protected] / 617.407.3115)Wanda Strukus ([email protected] / 781.405.3285)

WaltersWest Project and Fort Point Theatre Channel present a unique and relevant production of Long Dayʼs Journey into Night, by Eugene OʼNeill at Hibernian Hall. The production casts actors of color as the Tyrone family, and infuses the play with African-American music and movement.

WHAT WaltersWest Project and Fort Point Theatre Channel present the 20th cen-tury classic, Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill.

WHEN March 17 – April 4, 2020All Evenings at 7:30pm, Matinees at 2pmSee complete schedule at end of release

PRESS NIGHT Friday, March 20, 2020, 7:30pm. RSVP at [email protected]

WHERE Hibernian Hall, 184 Dudley Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts 02119Hibernian Hall is physically accessible for patrons who use wheelchairs

TICKETS $50 Supporter (your ticket helps underwrite community, student, and senior tickets)$25 Adult$15 Students (with Student ID)$15 Seniors$15 Preview Nights (March 17 and March 18, 2020)

ONLINE TICKETS longdaysjourneyintonight.brownpapertickets.com



PHOTOS AND GRAPHICS

Questions? walterswestproject @gmail.comhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1GO0P3cYU0H-kUAyMBp8RvOI-k5zRT0hTK

Hibernian Hall is a cultural destination that contributes to neighborhood revitalization in Lower Roxbury, offering arts and cultural programming available as a fl exible space for stage productions, artists’ showcases, fi lm screenings, and cultural celebrations.www.madison-park.org/what-we-do/arts-culture/hibernian-hall

Long Day’s Journey Into Night opens March 17, 2020 at Hibernian Hall* in Roxbury with a cast of color and a woman-powered production team. The play, which won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for its author, Eugene O’Neill, is a semi-autobiographical memoir of his self-destructive Irish-American family and the binding power of memories.

Directed by Boston director, Fort Point Theatre Channel’s Amy S. West, the production presents a unique and relevant perspective by casting actors of color as the Tyrone family, and infusing O’Neill’s play with African-American music and movement.

The cast includes local favorites Dayenne CB Walters as Mary Tyrone (The Crucible, Central Square Theatre and With Glittering Eyes, at Hibernian Hall), Paul Benford-Bruce as James Tyrone (The Convert, Central Square Theatre and Three Sisters, Apollinaire Theatre), Dominic Carter as Jamie Tyrone (Fences, The Umbrella Arts Center and Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, Hovey Players), and Ciera-Sade Wade as Cathleen (for colored girls... and director of StickFly, both at Hibernian Hall), joined by Zair Silva as Edmund (Coriolanus, Praxis Stage and Smoked Oysters, TC Squared).

Called, “A tempest in a bourbon bottle” by the New York Times, Long Day’s Journey Into Night takes place over the course of one sultry day in August 1912, at the Connecticut vacation home where the Tyrone family gathers every summer. Small arguments begin right after breakfast between James, a former “matinee idol” and Mary, his stay-at-home wife who nurses her own secrets under the watchful eye of the entire household. Petty quarrels become verbal attacks and the cruel ghosts of the past emerge when the couple is joined by their sons Jamie, a ne’er do well playboy/actor and Edmund, a seafaring, sometime- news-paper-writer with a poet’s soul.

WaltersWest Project and Fort Point Theatre Channel present a unique and relevant perspective on the play, holding this American classic under the pressure of contem-porary scrutiny, providing new insights, and exploring the play’s continued relevance within larger questions of what it means to be alive, to be human, to be a family and to thrive, not just survive.

In addition to seeking out social parallels with our work, our mission is to champion diversity and collaboration, and to strive to create a space where all are welcome.

This production is partially funded through an Opportunity Grant from the City of Boston

For more information contact Amy S. West ([email protected]) or Wanda Strukus, Production Manager ([email protected])

* Hibernian Hall is physically accessible for patrons who use wheelchairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 17, 2020



Who Gets to Play Mary Tyrone? Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is presented at Hibernian Hall, March 17 - April 4, 2020 with actors of color and a women-led production team.

WaltersWest Project and Fort Point Theatre Channel present a new production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, casting the play with actors of color and exploring the story through the lens of African-American experiences, revisiting the question of who gets to play canonical American theater roles, and particularly focusing on Mary Tyrone and the way gender and race impact portrayals of struggle, strength, and survival.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night has been a classic of American theater since winning the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1957. It is a harrowing,pressure-cooker of a play, with a searing focus on one day in the life of the Tyrones, a family tearing itself apart with lost dreams, guilt, and addiction. It offers actors extraordinary challenges and deeply drawn, complex characters who experience lightness, love, brutality, and despair, often with a fl air for the dramatic. Historically, these roles have been played by white actors, with a few notable exceptions including the 1981 New York African-American production produced by Hazel J. Bryant and the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art featuring Gloria Foster, Earle Hyman, Al Freeman Jr., Peter Francis-James and Samantha McCoy and the 1982 television movie fea-turing Ruby Dee, Earle Hyman, Thommie Blackwell, Peter Francis-James, and Rhetta Hughes, and for which Ruby Dee won an ACE award.

According to producer Hazel J. Bryant, the 1981 stage production was created to have “universal appeal to cross-cultural audiences” (NY Times Feb 19, 1981). The production opened at the Theatre at St. Peter’s Church on March 3rd and shortly moved to Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre where it played for 87 perfor-mances. Reviewer Mel Gussow praised the production, observing that this trimmed-down version ignored both the Irish background of the original characters and the African-American background of the actors, approaching the play from a point of “nonethnicity” and interpreting it with “freshness and immediacy.” His few criticisms were aimed at Gloria Foster, who had made her mark in American theater with extraordinary performances in such roles as Medea, Clytemnestra, Volumnia, and Mother Courage, as lacking the

fragility to convincingly play the convent-raised Mary Tyrone (NY Times, Mar 3, 1981). According to inter-views with Gloria Foster, director Geraldine Fitzgerald cast Foster in the role in part because she was seeking a more complex interpretation of the role (Yvonne Shafer, Performing O’Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors.)

Lingering questions about the portrayal of Mary Tyrone and which actresses have access to her inform our 2020 production of Long Day’s Journey into Night at Hibernian Hall. The genesis of the project came from Dayenne C.B. Walters, a Boston-based actress of color who is drawn to the character of Mary Tyrone, feeling a strong connection to this woman who seems to be hanging on to life by her fi ngernails. Walters is known for playing “strong women” and “survivors” and felt that she would not have the opportunity to play a character like Mary Tyrone unless she created that opportunity herself, working with a cast of actors of color, and fi nding a new interpretation and contempo-rary relevance for this iconic family and the pressures of its past.

With close collaborator and theater director Amy West on board, WaltersWest Projects soon gathered a production team of women from diverse cultural backgrounds, giving the project a decidedly women-focused and multicultural lens. The male characters– James Tyrone, played by Paul Benford-Bruce, and sons Jamie and Edmund, played by Dominic Carter and Zair Silva respectively—are powerful forces in the pro-duction, but there is a sense of drawing Mary and her relationships with her family towards the center of the story. The objective of the production is not to erase cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds but to fi nd relationships and connections as well as points of rupture and disconnect between the Irish American Tyrones as written by O’Neill, and the African-American actors who play them, and to create a Tyrone family, and a Mary Tyrone, for Boston in 2020.



ABOUT THE ARTISTS

• Paul Benford-Bruce (James Tyrone) The Visit, Apollinaire Theatre Co.; Patience Boston, The Player’ Ring No More Hog Jowls at the Jim Crow Counter, Boston Playwright’s Theatre, Duck and Cover, West End Studio Theatre

• Dayenne CB Walters (Mary Tyrone) Exit The King, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, The Plague, Praxis Stage, for colored girls…, Praxis Stage, Gift of an Orange, Tennessee Williams Festival, New Orleans and Provincetown

• Dominic Carter (Jamie Tyrone) Twelfth Night, Lyric Stage Company, RACE, Hovey Players, All My Sons, Praxis Stage, Romeo & Juliet, The Underling Theater Company, The Greater Good, Company One

• Zair Silva (Edmund Tyrone) Romeo and Juliet, The Opposite of People, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Fudge Theatre, King John, Actor’s Shakespeare Project

• Ciera-Sadé Wade (Cathleen) or, the whale, Imaginary Beasts, The Weird, Off the Grid Theatre Company, Top Eye Open, Hibernian Hall), The Love of the Nightingale, Open Theatre Project

PRODUCTION TEAMAmy S. West (Director) credits range from staged readings and festivals with Fort Point Theatre Channel, to TC Squared Theatre Company, Offi ce of War Information Bureau of Theatre, Open Theater Project/SLAMBoston, One Minute Play Festival, a few Boston Theatre Marathons, and a self-produced a staged reading of Occupant , by Edward Albee in association with Tufts University Art Gallery. In 2016 she dreamed up Contemporary Park Shorts whose mission is to bring new plays for all to parks and non-traditional spaces, bare bones and experimental.

Audrey Seraphin (Assistant Director) is an artist and arts administrator who works in the Boston theatre community as an actor, director, stage manager, and community organizer. By day, she is the Membership & Capacity Building Manager at ArtsBos-ton, where she runs the Network of Arts Administrators of Color (NAAC) Boston. Audrey moonlights as the Community Engagement Director at The Front Porch Arts Collective, a black theatre company dedicated to eradicating racial injustice in Bos-ton. Recent directorial work includes Coriolanus, Praxis Stage, Una Me Da Leche, She Said Festival, and This Is Not a True Story, Asian-American Theatre Artists of Boston, as well as assisting on Breath & Imagination, Lyric Stage & Front Porch Arts Collective.

Stage Manager: Naomi Ibasitas Movement Direction: Lola RemyMusic: Akili Jamal HaynesDramaturgs: Ciera-Sadé Wade, Michael AndersonCostume Design: Lila WestLighting Design: Ashley YungProduction Manager: Wanda StrukusProps Design: Emma McGrory



SPONSORS (partial list)The City of Boston Opportunity Grant FundFort Point Theatre Channel

PERFORMANCES and RELATED EVENTS

Thursday March 12, 7:30pm

Open Rehearsal and Talkback, Sponsored by City of Boston Opportunity Grant Panel Discussion: Bringing an African-American Perspective to Long Dayʼs Journey Into Night

Tuesday March 17, 7:30pm – PREVIEW

Wednesday March 18, 7:30pm – PREVIEW

Friday March 20, 7:30 pm

OPENING NIGHT / PRESS NIGHT and Meet the Artists Panel Discussion: with Cast and Production Team

Hosted by Hibernian Hall, refreshments served

Saturday March 21, 2pm

Saturday March 21, 7:30pm

Friday March 27, 7:30pm

Saturday March 28, 2pm

Saturday March 28, 7:30pm

Sunday March 29, 2pm

Friday April 3, 7:30pm

Saturday April 4, 2pm – FINAL PERFORMANCE









For media photos go to:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GO0P3cYU0H-kUAyMBp8RvOI-k5zRT0hTK

or contact:

[email protected]

Photo Credit:©2020 Roberto Mighty

Documents

Electronic Press Kit · Electronic Press Kit TABLE OF CONTENTS Page 2 Production Info Page 3 Press Release Page 4 Who Gets To Play Mary Tyrone: A Historical Perspective Page 6 Sponsors