PR 2006 Jan U1

Winter Chills Arrive with Theatre Tuscaloosa’s The Woman in Black 

Tuscaloosa - Theatre Tuscaloosa delivers a dark New Year’s gift to its audiences this winter with Stephen Mallatratt's adaptation of Susan Hill's Victorian inspired ghost play, The Woman in Black, opening January 13, 2006 at the Bean-Brown Theatre on the campus of Shelton State Community College.

This winter thriller is the bone-chilling, insidiously eerie story of a solicitor sent to a remote house on the thick, dank English marshes. There he attempts to settle the affairs of its late owner and gets much more than he’s bargained for when he’s left to pass the night there alone, cut off from land by the rising tide. The locals believe the house is cursed, and the initially skeptical young man soon finds himself confronting the grim echoes of its blighted past and the terrible specter that haunts it.

The production is directed by Tina Fitch and features Gary Wise as Arthur Kipps and as Jeff Wilson as “The Actor.”

Michael Carr, Artistic Director of Theatre Tuscaloosa, remarked, “This play is so deliciously eerie and well written that it would be a horror not to produce it again - and with the same actors who performed it so brilliantly for us in 1997.”

The Woman in Black was first performed at the Theatre-By-the-Sea in Scarborough, England in 1987. The original production received rave reviews, paving the way for future productions throughout the country. It reached the West End in 1989, and has been a major audience pleaser ever since. Its success has subsequently reached global proportions, having spread to the US, South America, through to Tokyo, and beyond.

Unanimously acclaimed by the critics and now celebrating over 14 years in London’s West End, The Woman in Black combines the power and intensity of live theatre with the cinematic quality of film noir. The Woman in Black is a ghost story in the classic English tradition. Hill drew her inspiration from 19th-century English gothic novels and their immediate descendants, the moody atmospheric ghost stories of Dickens and Henry James.

Performances will be 7:30 p.m. Jan. 13-14 and 19-21, with 2 p.m. matinees Jan. 15 and 22. Tickets for The Woman in Black are $15 for adults, seniors, students and children and $5 for Shelton State students with their student I.D. card. Tickets may be purchased at the Theatre Tuscaloosa box office located in the lobby of the Bean-Brown Theatre or may be purchased by phone by calling 205/391-2277. For additional information, please visit the Theatre Tuscaloosa website at www.theatretusc.com.