[NEohioPAL] "Barrymore's Ghost" Opens Tonight, 3 Shows Only

[Nancy Cates]

Ohio Shakespeare Festival presents

Richard Figge in Barrymore's Ghost

at Coach House Theatre in Akron

 

            Actor Richard Figge will perform Jason Miller's one-man play
Barrymore's Ghost, directed by Nancy Cates, and presented by Ohio
Shakespeare Festival at Coach House Theatre, opening tonight, Halloween, at
8pm.   Additional performances are Saturday, November 1 at 8pm, and Sunday,
November 2, at 2:30pm.

 

Tickets are $10 for theatre only, or $25 for dinner (or brunch) and theatre,
with dinner prior to the performances at the adjacent Akron Woman's City
Club.  Coach House and the City Club are located at 732 W. Exchange St., at
the intersection of N. Portage Path and Exchange.  For reservations or
ticket information, call Ohio Shakespeare Festival at 330-673-8761.
www.ohioshakespeare.com

 

            John Barrymore (1882-1942) was perhaps the most famous member of
a theatrical dynasty.  John, his brother Lionel, and his sister Ethel were
known as the "Royal family of the American theater."  John's granddaughter
Drew continues that acting tradition in our own day.

 

            The play opens up the life of the legendary John Barrymore in a
unique and theatrical manner.  Mr. John Barrymore, or Jack Barrymore or Jake
Barrymore, is presented as a ghost haunting an unknown theater, which, at
the moment, is in rehearsal for a play.  

 

            The gods have sentenced Barrymore to this purgatorial existence
as penance for his abandonment of the theater and the squandering of his
talents, in the pursuit of fame, greed, and dissipation.  Barrymore disputes
these assertions of the gods as he painfully and humorously examines the
spectrum of his life.  

 

            He chronicles his ascendancy to the throne as the finest
classical actor of his generation; his arrival to the pinnacle of movie
stardom; his intimate and compassionate relationships to his sister Ethel
and his brother Lionel; and the explosive debacles of his four marriages.  

 

            The play has wit, terror, agony and hope, as we watch a
mythological character explore the truths and deceptions of his
extraordinary life.

 

            Richard Figge is a character actor whose credits range from
Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac to
modern comedy and drama.  He is best known for his one-man performance as
Clarence Darrow, with which he has toured in the United States and Europe
and which he presented in 1985, under the sponsorship of President Reagan,
in Washington, D. C. 

 

            He has toured in productions of Mass Appeal and Love Letters.
In 1997 he toured with Vincent Dowling, portraying President Theodore
Roosevelt to Mr. Dowling's John Muir in Phyllis Webster's new play John and
Teddy.  In April of 1998 he returned to Wooster to play Prospero in
Shakespeare's The Tempest.  Mr. Figge has experience in film and has made
many radio and television commercials.  He has performed in special
broadcasts on public radio and can be heard as the narrator on the CD,
Visions of Souls: The Joshua L. Chamberlain Story.   He has narrated Peter
and the Wolf with the Wooster Symphony Orchestra and was a narrator for a
performance of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale with the Charlottesville
(Virginia) Symphony. He has recently appeared as Joe Keller in the
Weathervane Community Playhouse's production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons
under the direction of Nancy Cates and as Polonius in the Ohio Shakespeare
Festival's 2008 production of Hamlet, directed by Terry Burgler.

 

 

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