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What began as a love of classic Hollywood films is now a new, classical theater production company. Producer Karen Tuccio brings more than a decade of local theater and film experience to this exciting venture. Her company presents plays from Hollywood’s Golden Age that were adapted into feature films. Past productions include: Desk Set, The 39 Steps – A live radio play, Parfumerie, Vintage Hitchcock, The Man Who Came to Dinner and Vivien Leigh: The Last Press Conference.
(Linda) is delighted to be working with such a terrific group of individuals on her second production with Screen Plays (Vivien in Vivien Leigh: The Last Press Conference). Regional: Death of a Salesman (Geva Theatre Center) and All’s Well in the Kingdom of Nice (Geva’s Nextstage). Other theatre: Harper in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Sylvia Plath...
(Johnny) is an actor and producer at Hearing Damage Studios. Smith recently received the Outstanding Achievement in Acting Award from the Theatre Association of New York State for his role in Gothic Tale. A proud Rochester native, Smith is also a trained Stanislavski method actor, who over the years, has worked on 32 films, 21 theatrical productions, 38 musical releases, and...
(Julia) is delighted to be making her Screen Plays debut in Holiday! Other area stage credits include Beehive, the 60’s Musical with Blackfriars Theatre, Handle With Care (Ayelet) with JCC CenterStage,
ROOMS: a rock romance (Monica) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Yischak) at the Rochester Fringe Festival, Disney’s My Son Pinocchio (Blue Fairy) with TYKEs, and numerous productions with ...
(Edward) After 35 years directing local television and raising a family in Geneseo, Bill is now retired and has been seen around the Rochester theatre scene for the last few years. He is coming directly from the TANYS Festival, where he portrayed Mr. Raymond in The Receptionist, which earned him the Best Long Performance award. In 2015 he returned to the Irish International Theatre...
(Ned) has enjoyed the continuing challenge of being cast against type in his debut with Screen Plays, having recently played Death (Death Takes a Holiday, First Light Players), a con-artist’s accomplice (Sam Nightingale, Leap of Faith, FLP), and a young Irish thug (Tadhg, The Field, Irish Players of Rochester). In real life, he is trained as a geologist, historian, and teacher, and...
(Susan) is a native of Western New York, Nancy studied dance and psychology at Keuka College and SUNY Brockport. She has taken on nearly every job in the theatre over the past few decades with numerous organizations, primarily in the Northeastern US. As an artist particularly enamored with the creative process, she gravitates toward new or seldom performed works and is thrilled...
(Nick) is appearing in his first production with Screen Plays. He is a native of Boston and was last seen this past September as Colonel Nathan Jessep in A Few Good Men at Blackfriars Theatre where he had his Rochester debut 17 years ago as Sherlock in The Mask of Moriarity. Favorite roles in other area productions include Tilden in Buried Child for Out of Pocket, Soldiers Heart & Frozen for Shipping Dock...
(Laura Cram) is thrilled to be back on Geva’s Fielding Stage performing for Screen Plays. In December 2014, Gretchen appeared as Lorraine in Screen Plays’ The Man Who Came to Dinner. She has performed in numerous shows with Limelight Productions, The Mystery Company, Penfield Players & Black Sheep Theatre. Favorite productions include: Black Sheep’s Sordid Lives & Almost,...
(Seton) is thrilled to once again be in a Screen Plays, Hollywood’s Golden Age on Stage production. His previous work for Screen Plays include 39 Steps Radio Play & The Desk Set. Other productions he has been in include Everyone’s Theatre Company’s
Titanic the Musical, Check Please, Hostage, The Interview, & Grease; Black Sheep’s Take That Cupid; Limelight Productions’ The Psychic; ...
(Henry) was first was bitten by the acting bug in high school when he won the Don Knott’s summer acting internship from West Virginia University. As life happens, he drifted into a conservative banker’s life and left acting behind. He picked it up again in his later years to help found the Improve Comedy group “Left For Dead” which bills itself as the “oldest” Improve group in America comprised of senior...
(Charles) became involved in theater through friends he has met as a five year member of the LEFT for DEAD Improv team and its involvement with the Rochester Improv community. Last December, he portrayed Dr. Bradley in Screen Plays production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. As the servant in Holiday, he has prior experience waiting on people from growing up in a family of ten with one...
(Delia) This marks Kathy’s second performance with Screen Plays. Last December, she fulfilled a dream come true portraying Harriet in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Kathy has appeared in several shows with groups including the Rochester Community Players, Shakespeare Players, Blackfriars, Penfield Players, Arden, Irish Players, ShakeCo, and Burning Barn Theater. When not acting, she is...
(Stage Manager) is thrilled to be making both her Geva and Screen Plays debut! A relative newcomer to the theatre scene, Amanda has managed shows for Bread and Water Theatre (BWT), GRRC, MUCC, Elephant Productions and her “home” company, Limelight Productions of Rochester. Most recently, she returned from managing Limelight Productions production of The Receptionist at the 2015...
(Assistant Stage Manager, Sound Design) is pleased to be working with Screen Plays for the third time. She studied Theater at SUNY Brockport, where some of her favorite shows included Black Comedy, The Cover of Life, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has also worked with NTID’s theater department and the Penfield Players while occasionally designing lights and sound.
(Director) serves as New Plays Coordinator at Geva Theatre Center where, among other duties, she produces the Regional Writers Showcase and the Young Writers Showcase. She has been the dramaturg for many Geva productions, including 1776, Almost Maine, The Music Man, Company, Perfect Wedding, Wait Until Dark, Little Shop of Horrors,...
Holiday, written in 1928, was one of Philip Barry’s most successful plays (The Philadelphia Story was the other one) --- not only in terms of its box office success and subsequent Hollywood treatment, but in the way that it used Barry’s particular talent for romantic comedy to touch on one of his favorite themes: what happens in 20th century America when a person makes an unconventional choice about the use of money and time. The theme was close to Philip Barry’s heart: born in 1896, here in Rochester (a graduate of East High), Barry was expected to enter the family marble and tile business, but disappointed his family’s expectations when he chose to study playwriting instead. Many of his plays, including You and I, The Youngest, The Jilts, and Holiday, explore this choice: a young man is torn between the materialism of the age and his own plans for a worthwhile life. Perhaps a reason Holiday continues to be produced to this day is that these issues have not gone away. Money is still
a touchstone in society: how one earns it and how one uses it reveal a lot about a person. It’s interesting to be doing this play next door to a production of A Christmas Carol, that perennial holiday story that asks the same questions: what is the purpose of amassing wealth? What is the best way to live one’s life? How much money is enough?
In 1927, Barry and his family lived for a time in France, where they hobnobbed with the likes of Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and their close friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy. Gerald and Sara Murphy were renowned not so much for accomplishments of their own, but for the choices they had made in life. Both from wealthy families and so financially independent, they elected not to devote their lives to careers and money-making, but to living well. They established households in the south of France, and befriended and entertained the most prominent artists and writers of the day, many of them other American expatriates.
Philip Barry was one of their circle. They were known to be generous friends and creative, enthusiastic lovers of life, who put the quality of their time above material concerns. They were a profound influence on Barry, as successful examples of the kind of life to which he aspired. The characters Nick and Susan Potter, in Holiday, are based directly on them: a still-young couple, enjoying life to the fullest, using money without squandering it, and setting an example of an alternate lifestyle. (In the 1938 film version of Holiday, the characters have been changed considerably from the original script: they have become a middle-aged college professor and his motherly wife.
Perhaps the deliberate reference to Gerald and Sara Murphy would have been lost on a wider audience that was living through the Depression.) Hindsight is 20/20. We know, as Barry did not, that only a year after the writing of Holiday, the materialism and high living that had gripped the country for a decade would lead to its own collapse.
The stock market crash of 1929 would vindicate Barry’s stated values. Although Barry is best remembered as a writer of comedies about the most affluent class, underneath the light tone, there was always a serious theme. As critic Brooks Atkinson wrote of Barry, “he liked the role of prophet.”
