TheaterWorks Hartford is officially announcing today that its 25th anniversary season will begin in July with a world premiere production starring Kathleen Turner.
“High” by Matthew Lombardo will open July 9 and run through Aug. 22.
Lombardo is the author of “Tea at Five,” a Katharine Hepburn bio-drama that served as a spectacular vehicle for Kate Mulgrew at Hartford Stage in 2002. The actress took the show to New York and then toured in it extensively.
In the new drama, Turner will play Sister Jamison Connelly, a rehab counselor who begins to question her vocation after working with a 19-year-old addict.
Following the Hartford run, the play will move on to two other major regional theaters — the Cincinnati Playhouse, and Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.
Turner started her career in the theater — she did plays in New York while working on the daytime drama “The Doctors” in the late 1970s — but her film debut in the 1981 hit “Body Heat” (below) launched her as one of the top female stars of the 1980s.
The actress solidified her appeal to critics and audiences with the 1984 blockbuster “Romancing the Stone” and then a series of hits that included “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The War of the Roses.”
Perhaps sensing the ephemeral nature of film stardom, Turner made regular returns to the theater – including an appearance at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in “Camille” in 1986 (the same year she received an Oscar nomination for “Peggy Sue Got Married”) and then a Tony-nominated performance in the 1990 Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
The star’s movie career seemed to end as quickly as it began — Turner never really recovered from the disaster of “V.I. Warshawski” in 1991.
Illness and alcoholism did a job on Turner’s appearance that shocked fans who viewed her as a sex symbol only a few years earlier — the changes also seemed to put her out of the running for film roles in major productions and she just didn’t have the knack for finding good roles in independent films where she might play “character” parts.
The problems faced by actresses in a youth obsessed culture were magnified in Turner’s case.
Fortunately, Turner developed serious stage chops in her returns to the theater and now has found her true home. The actress triumphed in a Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a few seasons ago (above) and repeated that success when the show moved to London.
Turner seems to be as busy on stage now as she was in film 20 years ago. She is about to open in Philadelphia in a new one-woman play about the feisty Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins and the actress will move right from that show to Hartford for rehearsals for “High.”
For complete ticket information visit TheaterWorks at www.theaterworkshartford.org.
