Arts & Lectures
2005-2006 Performing Arts Season News Release
For Immediate Release

September 28, 2005

Breaking News—LA Theatre Works announces cast changes for The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

LA Theatre Works has announced that The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, which it will perform on Friday, October 14 at 8 pm and on Saturday, October 15 at 2 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall, will star Edward Anser, John de Lancie and Alley Mills. James Cromwell and Marsha Mason, originally slated to co-star, cannot appear due to recent movie commitments. The cast also features eight actors that play-goers will recognize from TV, Broadway and the Center Theater Group.

John de Lancie, who will play the role of Clarence Darrow, is a multi-talented actor of the stage, the small and large screen, and the music world. Perhaps most widely known as Q on Star Trek, de Lancie has appeared in numerous films including The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, The Fisher King, Bad Influence and The Onion Field, and a host of television programs, including Hill Street Blues, West Wing and Sports Night. He has been a member of The American Shakespeare Festival, The South Coast Repertory, The Mark Taper Forum and the Old Globe, where he recently performed Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues.

In the world of music, de Lancie has performed with a number of major conductors and orchestras nationwide including Kurt Masur, Sir Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic; Esa Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra and The Montreal Symphony. De Lancie was the host of the LA Philharmonic “Symphonies for Youth” for four years. He wrote and directed ten Symphonic Plays, ninety-minute programs that are fully staged productions with orchestra, and was also the writer/director/host of “First Nights,” a concert series at Disney Hall with the LA Philharmonic that explored the life and music of Stravinsky, Beethoven, Mahler, Schumann and Prokofiev. De Lancie is a regular fixture at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival where he has performed/directed five productions.

Alley Mills, who will play the role of the Narrator, is a magna-cum-laude graduate of Yale’s first all-female class, and also earned an M.A. in Drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Although best-known for her six-year run playing Norma Arnold on the Emmy and Peabody award-winning series The Wonder Years, Mills has starred in a dozen other series and numerous TV feature films including Hill Street Blues, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and Yes, Dear. On the big screen, she played the lead opposite John Candy in the movie Going Berserk. Throughout the 1990s, Mills served as the international spokesperson for Say No to Drugs, and is currently a volunteer caseworker for disaster relief at the American Red Cross. She lives in Venice, California where she and her husband Orson Bean are active members of the highly acclaimed Pacific Resident Theater. She has recorded a number of plays for LA Theatre Works including Playboy of the Western World, Antigone and Anna Christie.

Actor/activist Edward Asner is best known for his comedic and dramatic crossover as the gruff but soft-hearted journalist Lou Grant, the role he originated on the landmark TV news room comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show and continued in the newspaper-set drama Lou Grant, which earned him five Emmys and three Golden Globe Awards. Asner received two more Emmy and Golden Globe Awards for the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. His prolific and much honored acting career demonstrates a consummate ability to transcend the line between comedy and drama.

In 1925 high school science teacher John T. Scopes challenged the Tennessee state law by teaching evolution. The resulting trial became a national battleground that drew larger-than-life figures like Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan and H.L. Mencken to a tiny courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. Their arguments about the separation of church and state and the battles between science and a literal reading of the Bible rage on to this day, as the Kansas Board of Education just this August voted to include greater criticism of evolution in its school science standards and President Bush suggested schools should teach “intelligent design” as well as evolution. The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial radio play brings the fascinating figures of Darrow, Bryan and Mencken and their conflicting ideas to life in an immediate and spontaneous performance, thanks to a first-rate cast and live sound effects. The New York Post raves, “This is electric theater that can move, shock and thrill.”

Founded in 1974, LA Theatre Works began with the vision of a dedicated group of artists, led by Susan Albert Loewenberg Producing Director, who were inspired to use theatre as a force for reaching communities that were traditionally underserved. In 1985, LATW made the decision to move from a conventional theatre producing organization to a “virtual” theatre company. The group repositioned theatre to be a widely accessible and affordable resource by producing and recording live audio theatre. Today its Audio Theatre Collection includes more than 320 classic and contemporary titles—the largest library of its kind in the world. LATW’s plays are broadcast on public and satellite radio throughout the country and can also be heard on Voice of America, the BBC, and CBC as well as other English language broadcasters worldwide.

Much lauded, the Audio Theatre Collection has received awards from the Audio Publishers Association, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Guild of America, and the American Library Association. Its recording of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason, received a Grammy nomination in 2001.

Theater-goers may enhance their experience by attending a tasty Tennessee buffet served by the UCSB Faculty Club at 6 pm on Friday, October 14. The dinner is $18 per person; reservations must be made by October 7 by calling (805) 893-3096.

LA Theatre Works is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by the Santa Barbara Independent and El Prado Inn. The residency is sponsored by Herbert & Elaine Kendall. Tickets are $45 for the general public and $19 for UCSB students who must show valid ID at ticket purchase and the evening of the show. A $125 ticket includes VIP seating and a post-performance reception with the cast on October 14.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.

©2005 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara