Actor Julian Sands, best known for his role as George Emerson in the Merchant and Ivory classic A Room With a View, comes to Steppenwolf Theater tonight for A Celebration of Harold Pinter.
A longtime friend of the playwright, Sands combines Pinter’s poems and prose to offer insight into the Nobel laureate’s literary legacy with personal anecdotes and reflections drawn from his work with Pinter.
A few years before his death, Pinter requested that Sands fill in for him at a poetry reading when he was too ill to go on. The experience inspired this production, which debuted in 2011 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in homage to Pinter, who died in 2008. The show toured through Britain and was presented in San Francisco, Los Angeles and to sold-out audiences in New York.
Directed by ensemble member John Malkovich, who costarred with Sands in 1984’s The Killing Fields, A Celebration of Harold Pinter begins at 7:30 pm on February 10 in the Downstairs Theatre on 1650 N. Halsted Street.
This evening’s show is produced in conjunction with Pinter’s The Birthday Party which runs through April 28 in Steppenwolf’s Upstairs Theatre.
“I think the extraordinary accomplishment in Pinter's work is his mastery of language, which is so precise and so, at the same time, ambiguous and unlikely. We are constantly being asked to interpret the truth and to be aware of how language both defines and obscures the real,” comments Artistic Director Martha Lavey.
Directed and newly-reconfigured by ensemble member Austin Pendleton, the play features ensemble members Ian Barford, Francis Guinan, Moira Harris and John Mahoney; with Marc Grapey and Sophie Sinise, daughter of Harris and Steppenwolf co-founder Gary Sinise.
The production team includes: Walt Spangler (scenic design), Rachel Anne Healy (costume design), Keith Parham (lighting design) and Josh Schmidt (sound design and original music).
Tickets range from $20 to $78. Free post-show discussions are offered after every performance in the Subscription Season. Assistive listening devices and large-print programs are available for every performance. For details, visit www.steppenwolf.org.
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