Woolf's Play, "Freshwater"

It's a banner year for Woolf in New York. Here is yet *another* Woolfian theater piece upcoming, with a premier on January 25th. I've pasted in information from the press release. This is, they tell me, the first professional production of "Freshwater" in the U.S.

Women's Project and SITI Company present Virginia Woolf's Only Play
FRESHWATER
Directed by Anne Bogart
Previews Thursday, January 15, at 8:00pm
Opens on Woolf's 128th B'day Sunday, January 25, at 7:00pm
NEW YORK - Women's Project and SITI Company are not afraid of Virginia Woolf or of her only play never seen on a professional stage in New York, the 1923 comedy Freshwater. Freshwater will open on Virginia Woolf's 128th birthday, Sunday, January 25, at 7:00pm after beginning previews Thursday, January 15 (for a run through Sunday, February 15) at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street.

Women's Project Producing Artistic Director Julie Crosby has wanted to produce Freshwater since first she discovered the comedy a dozen years ago while teaching at Columbia University. Anne Bogart, with whom Dr. Crosby worked on Laurie Anderson’s Songs & Stories from Moby Dick ten years ago, was the first director she approached for this adventurous project. Presented by Women's Project and Anne Bogart's SITI Company, Freshwater is a theatrical escapade set in a Victorian garden on a summer evening. Woolf, who wrote this play for friends and family, creates a deliberately witty and wacky universe peopled with a tribe of artists, friends and lovers in a playful mood. Written in 1923, revised in 1935, Freshwater has never been produced professionally in the United States. "The characters in Freshwater - Julia Cameron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ellen Terry and the others - had tremendous significance for the Bloomsbury Group, of which Woolf was a founding member," said director Bogart. "In this production, our challenge will be to channel the humor, intelligence, talent and giddiness of the original Bloomsbury group and deliver it to a 2009 audience."

Anne Bogart, one of the most celebrated directors of our time, is the Artistic Director of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. A professor at Columbia University, she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Recent works with SITI include Who Do You Think You Are, Radio Macbeth, Hotel Cassiopeia, Intimations for Saxophone, Death and the Ploughman, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, La Dispute, Score, bobrauschenbergamerica, Room, War of the Worlds, Cabin Pressure, War of the Worlds - The Radio Play, Alice’s Adventures, Culture of Desire, Bob, Going, Going, Gone, Small Lives/Big Dreams, The Medium, Noel Coward's Hayfever and Private Lives, August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and Charles Mee's Orestes. She is the author of a book of essays entitled A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater and the co-author with Tina Landau of The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Her newest book of essays is And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World.

Women's Project in collaboration with SITI Company presents
Virginia Woolf's FRESHWATER
Directed by Anne Bogart
January 15 - February 15, 2009
Visit www.WomensProject.org for details!