E-Mail This Article to a Friend Not so Mighty (continued)

Dennehy does Dalton

It would be hard to get too much of Brian Dennehy, whose 1999 Willy Loman was a fragile, lumbering triumph. Boston has been fortunate, though, to see the two-time-Tony-winning actor not only in Death of a Salesman but also in The Exonerated and, just out of town at Trinity Rep, last season’s double bill of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie and Sean O’Casey’s A Pound on Demand. Now the Huntington Theatre Company has announced that Dennehy will be back in town next February to play Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo, the Off Broadway hit about the writer who penned Spartacus and stood up to the poisonous Joseph McCarthy. Compiled by Trumbo’s son, Christopher, from the Oscar-winning scribe’s correspondence and directed by Peter Askin, the show will be part of the new "Huntington Presents" series in which the Huntington serves as presenter rather than producer. It will play the new Theatre Pavilion, adjacent to the Boston Center for the Arts, February 8 through 27.

Trumbo opened a successful Off Broadway run last fall, with a rotating cast of theater heavyweights portraying the McCarthy-pummeled member of the Hollywood Ten, who in 1947 refused to name names and did a year in prison for it, emerging to write two Oscar-winning screenplays (Roman Holiday and The Brave One) on which his name did not appear. (In the play, a second character, identified as Christopher Trumbo, provides narration and context for Trumbo’s own elegantly penned comments on everything from the House Un-American Activities Committee to the benefits of masturbation.) Dennehy was among those who played Trumbo in New York; the roster also included Nathan Lane, Charles Durning, F. Murray Abraham and Michael Richards (Seinfeld’s Kramer). Dennehy will handle the limited Boston run himself.

At present, tickets for Trumbo are being offered as a bonus option to Huntington subscribers only. (The Huntington shares management of the two new Theatre Pavilion spaces with the BCA.) The remaining seats will go on sale October 18.

— Carolyn Clay

Go Celtics

Súgán Theatre Company, the area’s theatrical expert on all things Celtic, will be emigrating next season — from the BCA Theatre in the Boston Center for the Arts to the new Roberts Theatre, the smaller of two new theaters to be unveiled next fall in the Theatre Pavilion next door at Atelier 505, a joint project of the Huntington Theatre Company and the BCA. Súgán, which recently announced its 2004-2005 season, will start out in its old digs, with an old play, then move to the Roberts for its second and third offerings, one an American premiere.

The season gets under way October 29 through November 20 with the great Irish playwright John Millington Synge’s 1905 black comedy The Well of the Saints, which did not provoke the riots Synge’s next lyrical comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, did when it debuted at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, though it’s considered sacrilegious by some. It’s about two blind, married beggars who get to see the world, and each other, for the first time when a wandering holy man restores their sight. No director has been announced.

The troupe moves to the 200-seat "black-box" Roberts Theatre February 4 through 26, when artistic director Carmel O’Reilly is slated to helm Tom Murphy’s 1975 play The Sanctuary Lamp (which, by the way, engendered the greatest disturbance since Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars when it debuted at the Abbey). Murphy, a contemporary of the more-often-exported Brian Friel (Faith Healer, Dancing at Lughnasa), is considered by some to be Ireland’s greatest living playwright. Súgán has previously mounted several of his works, including The Gigli Concert, Conversations on a Homecoming, and Bailegangaire. The Sanctuary Lamp was revived as part of a 2001-2002 Abbey retrospective of Murphy’s work. In the play, three disparate characters — Harry, an English-born Jew and former circus strongman; Francisco, an Irishman; and a waif named Maudie — spend a night in a church. "Betrayed by his best friend and wife and grieving over the death of his daughter, Harry talks to the sanctuary lamp to assuage his pain, his guilt, and his murderous intentions."

Also in the Roberts, Súgán will mount the American premiere of Scottish playwright Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way, April 1 through 23. The dark, funny first play by this native of Dunfermline, Gagarin Way debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001 and was hailed by the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Observer as among that year’s best plays. It moved to the small Cottlesloe space at London’s Royal National Theatre and from there to the Arts Theatre on the West End. The work has to do with a political kidnapping gone wrong, but the far-ranging subject matter includes suicide, economics, globalization, anthropology, and Existentialism. Brendan Hughes is slated to direct.

Tickets for Súgán’s 2004-2005 season will be available starting August 2; call (617) 933-8600.

— Carolyn Clay