Alumnus on Stage

Henry Gottfried '09 appears in Pokerface, a play by John Holleman (former USN teacher and father of Maggie Jones '07) being performed at Nashville's Darkhorse Theater July 5, 6 & 7, and July 12, 13 and 14.
Cris Cunningham, Andrew Gumm and Henry Gottfried will be acting in John Holleman's play "Pokerface," in Darkhorse Theater Thursday, Friday and Saturday July 5, 6 & 7, and July 12, 13 and 14. Admission is $10. After the Nashville run, the show travels north for a short run in Chicago.
 
The play was produced in several theaters around the country after its original production in Nashville in a 1996. For that production the play had the title "Fish or Cut Bait" and was directed by Robert Kieffer and produced by Darkhorse and Mockingbird Public Theater. The play was subsequently performed in several theaters around the country, including college and regional theaters. For this production, playwright John Holleman will direct a new revision of the work.
 
Playwright Holleman says, "This is a script that I've tinkered with for years between writing other scripts. The current draft reflects workshop influences from the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2009 under the eye of the late playwright Romulus Linney, as well as readings at the Clarence Brown Theater in Knoxville and the Atlantic Theater Company in Manhattan. Tinkering is fine, and readings have their value, but nothing compares to a production. Actors applying their energy in rehearsal and then in front of an audience is the only genuine test of a script's value."
 
Holleman's most recent original play was an adaptation of the Pulitzer-prize winning writings of ant biologists, E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler. Written for students at St. Andrew's-Sewanee School, the play was literally a staged nature documentary presented as an amalgam of movement-theater and spoken word performance art.
 
Cris Cunningham is a film producer and director from Indiana with a strong background in theater as well. This is his debut stage performance in Nashville. Andrew Gumm is also a filmmaker, though he has extensive experience in improv comedy. USN alum Henry Gottfried is a Nashville native currently enrolled at Yale University. He has performed with the Wishing Chair Productions, the Nashville Public Library's renowned puppet theater.
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