Pushcart Productions, Plainfield Arts (formerly Friends of Plainfield Opera House), and the Grange Hall Cultural Center is proud to present Trumbo: Red White and Blacklisted, a play featuring the razor sharp letters of Oscar winning writer Dalton Trumbo, at Plainfield Opera House on February 10 and 11 at 7pm and February 12 at 4pm; at the Grange Hall Cultural Center in Waterbury Center on February 17 and 18 at 7:30pm and on February 19 at 3pm; and The Main Street Museum in White River Junction on March 4 @ 7:30pm and March 5 @ 3pm.
Trumbo: Red White & Blacklisted, written by Trumbo's son Christopher, is a two person play featuring a series of Trumbo's letters and speeches. The letters that Trumbo wrote—to former friends, to fellow blacklistees, to his daughter's teacher, and even to the telephone company—are as well-crafted as any of the scripts that made him the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood until his fall from grace in 1947.
"...the letters are thrilling, uneconomical torrents of words, alternately grandiloquent, ferocious, withering, sentimental, thunderously overwrought and always tailored, often hilariously, to their intended readership of one." --Bruce Weber, NYT
The play was first created in 1997 when Christopher Trumbo organized a one-off event honoring his late father in which Steve Martin, an old friend of the Trumbo family, read from Dalton Trumbo's letters. The reception was so enthusiastic that Christopher reshaped the evening as a two-character play—Trumbo: Red, White, and Blacklisted—that opened as an Off-Broadway production in 2003, starring Nathan Lane as Trumbo. Successive Trumbos in that production included Alec Baldwin, Brian Dennehy, Ed Harris, Richard Dreyfuss, and Tim Robbins.
A dynamic team of Vermont artists and a scholar/artist have teamed up to bring the Oscar winning screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo's words to life. Donny Osman, a longtime Vermont theater type, will play Trumbo. History and context for the letters and speeches are provided through the narration of Trumbo's son, played by Nick Charyk, front man of the Vermont band The Western Terrestrials. The play is directed by Waterbury theater maker and co-founder of MOXIE Productions and GHCC, Monica Callan. Founder of Montpelier's Savoy Theater, Rick Winston, and author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains: The McCarthy Era in Vermont 1946-1960, is serving as the show's dramaturg.