Sally Field (Photo: Ga Fullner / Shutterstock.com via The Broadway Blog.)
Producer Scott Rudin announced today that two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field and two-time Tony Award winner Joe Mantello will return to the Broadway stage next season to star in Tennessee Williams’s most cherished play, The Glass Menagerie. Tony Award winner Sam Gold will direct the production, which will also star Finn Wittrock and Madison Ferris, who will be making her Broadway debut in the role of Laura Wingfield. The Glass Menagerie will begin performances at Broadway’s Golden Theatre on Tuesday, February 14, 2017, with an official opening night set for Thursday, March 23, 2017.
“To say this is a dream come true is an understatement,” Ms. Field said. “Working with the best of the best, from Sam Gold to Joe Mantello to Scott Rudin, on one of the greatest plays ever written is beyond thrilling. Right now I can barely breathe. Hopefully that’ll pass.”
Mr. Gold first directed this production of The Glass Menagerie with an entirely Dutch cast at Toneelgroep Amsterdam (Ivo van Hove, Artistic Director) in an engagement that garnered rave reviews and massive international attention.
Mr. Gold said, “The experience I had doing this play in Amsterdam was life-changing, and the fact that we’ve managed to put together this cast to do it on Broadway is the most perfect outcome I could have imagined. Like any sane person, I’ve been hoping for Sally Field to carve out some time to do a play again. When I saw her Mary Todd Lincoln, I started dreaming of her as Amanda Wingfield. As for Joe Mantello, seeing that original production of Angels in America, in which he starred, was a great source of inspiration for me at the time. Because Joe is such a wonderful director, he has had very little time to act. I’m incredibly lucky that he has agreed to come back to the stage to play Tom.”
The Glass Menagerie is the play that brought a brilliant young writer named Tennessee Williams to national attention, and, in his own words, “changed my life irrevocably” when it first premiered on Broadway in 1945. More than seventy years later, Williams’s most personal work for the stage continues to captivate and overwhelm audiences around the world.
