The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers
FESTIVAL FINALE
Race, politics, sex, and adolescence swirl around twelve-year-old tomboy Frankie as she struggles with life in her small Southern town. The Festival's new staging, as a radio play with an all black cast, brings new attention to a touching and poetic classic by one of America's finest novelists.
directed by Jade King Carroll
featuring Brenda Thomas
THE PROVINCETOWN TW THEATER FESTIVAL
in association with New Urban Theatre Laboratory, Boston, MA
"All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome..."
— Frankie, from The Member of the Wedding
"I can think of few better dramatic evocations of childhood...
a memorable portrait of adolescence."
— Charles Spencer, The Telegraph
About The Play
Frankie is twelve, and a bit of a misfit in her small Southern town. Her only friend is her six-year-old cousin, the effeminate John Henry West. Her brother Jarvis is getting married to glamorous Janice, and Frankie, who is in love with both of them, wants to go along on their honeymoon. The innocent Frankie is counseled by the worldly Berenice, the black woman who works as Frankie's family housekeeper.
Carson McCullers wrote this adaptation of her novel in the summer of 1946 in Nantucket, sitting at the same table where Tennessee Williams was working on his play Summer and Smoke.
About The Production
Boston's New Urban Theatre Laboratory (the group that staged the remarkable Gift of an Orange in 2012), partners with the Festival to rethink the meanings of black, white, innocence, wisdom, and life as a tomboy.
The Member of the Wedding is staged as a radio play, with minimal design and an emphasis on the vocal performances of the actors, who will draw our attention to the sounds and nuances of McCullers' writing.
Veteran actress Brenda Thomas will play Berenice, the black family housekeeper who offers her counsel to the unhappy tomboy Frankie. Thomas has been performing in regional and Off-Broadway theatres throughout the US for over 40 years, including at the Guthrie Theater, Yale Rep, Milwaukee Rep, Center Stage in Baltimore, and Actors Theatre of Louisville.
She was most recently seen in the Hartford TheatreWorks production of The Sty of the Blind Pig, for which she received a Connecticut Critics Circle Award.
Jade King Carroll will direct the production. Carroll's recent credits include Trouble In Mind at Two River Theater, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Portland Stage, and A Raisin In The Sun at Juilliard. She also worked as Associate Director for A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway with director Emily Mann.
Carroll is a TCG New Generations Future Leader Award recipient and received the Paul Green Award for Outstanding Emerging Theatre Professional from the National Theatre Conference and The Estate of August Wilson.