Following rave reviews Too Much Memory, written by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson, and directed by Ms. Gibson, has sold out its run through its closing on Monday, December 22, at the Fourth Street Theatre, 83 East 4th Street. The Rising Phoenix Repertory and Piece by Piece production opened Tuesday, December 9, to rave reviews as part of New York Theatre Workshop's Jonathan Larson Lab. All performances are sold out. Those wishing to be put on a waiting should arrive at the theatre 45 minutes prior to curtain.
Too Much Memory played at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival where it won the festival's Overall Excellence Award for Outstanding Play and played to sold-out houses.
A theatrical explosion of myth and revolution, Too Much Memory retells the classic Greek story of Antigone and sets it firmly in the present. A timeless drama of family conflict and social turmoil, the play is a contemporary collage of mythology and modernity incorporating texts by Richard Nixon, Tom Hayden, Peter Brook, Anne Carson, Pablo Neruda, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt.
The production will remount and expand on the world premiere Fringe Festival production and be accompanied by two political forums following the 5pm performances on Saturday, December 6 and Sunday, December 21. The guests on December 6 will include: Katrina vanden Heuvel (Editor of The Nation), Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights), Kathleen Chalfant (actress) and Leonard Jacobs; the moderator for this event will be Ambassador William vanden Heuvel (assistant to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy). On December 21, the guests include Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!), JoAnn Wypijewski (The Nation, Mother Jones), and Jared Bernstein (Economic Policy Institute); the moderator will be Leonard Jacobs. Topics of conversation will be based on themes addressed in the play and in the Antigone myth and will include "When the law is unjust, what options are available for the people to overcome it?" "When is civil disobedience anarchy?" "At what point does national security supersede civil liberties? and "In the face of change, how do you maintain the trust of the people?"
A first time collaboration between husband and wife- playwright Keith Reddin (Human Error/Atlantic Stage 2, Black Snow/Yale Rep, Life and Limb/Playwrights Horizons), and actress/director Meg Gibson (The Ride Down Mt. Morgan/Public Theater), Too Much Memory features Laura Heisler as Antigone (recently named an Off-Broadway Best by the Village Voice; Coram Boy, Stunning, Everything Will Be Different) and Peter Jay Fernandez as Creon (Pain and the Itch, Thunder Knocking on the Door, Henry IV).
The production will feature most of the rest of the original Fringe Festival cast including Aria Alpert (Four Women and a Waitress), MacLeod Andrews (Somewhere in the Pacific), Martin Moran (Spamalot, Cabaret, The Tricky Part), Seth Numrich (Iphigenia 2.0), Jamel Rodriguez (Yale MFA 2008), Ray Anthony Thomas (Kindness, Human Error, Half Nelson), and Wendy vanden Heuvel (Not I, Mud, Resurrection Blues).
Piece by Piece Productions has previously produced the Broadway production of Deborah Warner's Medea, starring Fiona Shaw; The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh in association with St. Anne's Warehouse; The Tricky Part by Martin Moran; and My Name is Rachel Corrie (associate producer with Royal Court Theatre). Rising Phoenix Repertory has commissioned and produced several award-winning world premiere productions in New York and is the recipient of the 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Awards' Caffe Cino Fellowship. Too Much Memory was presented this summer by the New York International Fringe Fesitval, a production of The Present Company.
Keith Reddin has written and acted in numerous plays with many local, regional, Off-Broadway, and Broadway theatres. As a writer, Reddin made his debut with the dark comedy Life and Limb in 1984. In addition Reddin's canon includes Rum and Coke, Highest Standard of Living, Life During Wartime, Big Time, Nebraska, Brutality of Fact, Black Snow, The Innocents Crusade, Almost Blue, Synergy, All the Rage, Can't Let Go, Frame 312, But Not for Me, Prophets of Nature, Human Error, and The Missionary Position. In 1993, Black Snow won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production of the year. In 1998, Reddin became a playwright in residence at The Goodman Theater in Chicago. His plays have been produced at Manhattan Theater Club, Playwrights Horizons, The New York Shakespeare Festival, Atlantic Theater, Primary Stages, as well as regionally and in London and Berlin. Adaptations include; Bulgakov's Black Snow, Shatrov's Maybe (with Vanessa Redgrave), Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, Thorton Wilder's Heaven's my Destination, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Rich Boy. For film, Reddin has written the successful screenplays It's the Rage and The Alarmist, both of which were adapted from his plays. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1993 television film, The Hearts of Justice. In addition to writing for film, he has also appeared in several films including Lolita, The Doors, Reversal of Fortune, Crossing Delancey, and Big.
