Virginia Woolf wrote Freshwater in 1923. She returned to it again in 1935. It was performed as a much-needed, unbuttoned, laughing evening for her friends and family.
Women's Project and SITI Company's presentation of Freshwater opens on Virginia Woolf's 127th 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. Dr. Crosby found two versions of Freshwater, one from 1923 and the other from 1935. Both scripts had different strengths and weaknesses. The solution was to combine the two versions, and an agreement was negotiated with Virginia Woolf's estate to do exactly that. 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. 'Anne Bogart just got the play and embraced its wackiness in a way that no one else could,' said Dr. Crosby."
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."
In her program notes, Ms. Bogart continues: "What is particularly remarkable about the play and the circumstances of the first and only performance in 1935, is to imagine one group of artists, the Bloomsbury group, performing a satire about another group of artists closely related to them but from the previous generation. Woolf, as an expression of a shared Bloomsbury opinion, was definitely lampooning and criticizing the Victorians for their odd obsessed ways but we can also feel a love and an awe of one tribe for another."
The Bloomsbury Group is in good company: Freshwater also boasts appearances by a porpoise, a marmoset and Queen Victoria.
Women's Project is not afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941), a towering figure in English literature, began writing professionally in 1905. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, and was followed by Night and Day (1919); Jacob's Room (1922); Mrs. Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando: A Biography (1928); The Waves (1931); The Years (1937); and Between the Acts (1941). Woolf took her own life in 1941.
Anne Bogart, 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.
Freshwater's designers are James Schuette (sets & costumes), Brian H. Scott (lights), and Darron L West (sound).
