Cast announced for Talley’s Folly revival at The Cockpit theatre

Casting has been announced for the new revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly.

The first revival in 40 years will run at London’s The Cockpit theatre from 13 – 29 October 2022.

Lanford Wilson’s classic forms part of the New York Voices programming season at the Marylebone venue, seeing USA-based Burning Coal Theatre Company join forces with The Cockpit to give today’s audience a visceral reminder that love and connection are the timeless human qualities that can see us through hard times.

Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, the Artistic Director of Burning Coal Theatre Company Jerome Davis (Dark Vanilla Jungle; The Iron Curtain Trilogy, The Cockpit) takes on the role of Matt Friedman, a Jewish Lithuanian refugee. Brooklyn-based Kelly Pekar (The Threepenny Opera, Off Broadway; Three Sisters, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park) makes her debut with Burning Coal as Sally Talley, a lonely farm girl from a conservative Protestant family. The play is the story of how this unlikely pair come together, for better or for worse, in a decaying boat house on a riverbank in Missouri.

It’s 1944 and the chaos of war means societies fracture, traditional expectations are collapsing, and people’s lives are the collateral damage. For Sally and Matt, caught together in a fading Missouri idyll and from wildly different backgrounds, there is hurt and anger.

They are worlds apart but, as Wilson’s play suggests, anger plus hope can equal change. Now, as then, upheaval, division and disquiet stalk continents and damaged and displaced people must find each other – no matter how difficult those connections might seem.

John Gulley, a professor of theatre studies at the University of North Carolina, directs the two-hander, part of a trilogy of plays that include Fifth of July, set 31 years later on the same Missouri estate as Talley’s Folly and Talley & Son.

For more information and tickets, visit thecockpit.org.uk