Casting has been announced for the first London production in 40 years of Lanford Wilson’s  Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Talley’s Folly, which plays at The Cockpit from 13-29 October.

Part of the New York Voices programming season at the Marylebone venue, this timely revival sees 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) 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. 

Directed by John Gulley, Wilson’s one-act play deals with the heroic resilience of the American heartland folks he grew  up with. Identifying the struggle, dignity and authenticity of those living in the ‘flyover states’,  Wilson examines that most American of subjects – immigration – through the relationship  between a Jewish refugee and a lonely, embittered and brilliant outcast.  

This profoundly serious but also beautiful and funny two-hander is 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. Wilson had planned to write as many as nine plays about the Talleys of Lebanon, Missouri  prior to his untimely death in 2011 at the age of 74. The original production of Talley's Folly played on Broadway and starred Judd Hirsh and Trish Hawkins. Its only other London  production, in 1983, was presented at the Lyric Hammersmith and starred Haley Mills and  Jonathan Pryce.  

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