Actors Theatre's Artistic Director Les Waters Makes Directing Debut with LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, 10/11

Artistic Director Les Waters and Managing Director Jennifer Bielstein have announced that Waters will stage his inaugural production as Artistic Director with Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill's epic drama will play a limited engagement of 24 performances in the Pamela Brown Auditorium at Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the Brown-Forman Series. It begins previews on October 9, opens October 11 and runs through October 28.

Single tickets are on sale now and can be purchased online at ActorsTheatre.org or by calling 502-584-1205. Long Day's Journey into Night is presented by special arrangement with SAMUEL FRENCH, INC.

"It's a titanic play for a quartet of extraordinary actors. It's the greatest play about family of all time, a play about love's struggles and confusions and failed promises," said Waters, an Obie award-winning director. Adding, "For me, it's a play about absence, about a mother who cannot be there in the way that her family needs her to be--as well as their guilt and anger that they are part of the problem, and their loving confusion about how to be part of the solution."

In his first production as Artistic Director, Les Waters directs this epic yet powerfully intimate, Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a family confronting a sea of regret and longing, haunted by the past. Over the course of one fateful summer day, renowned actor James Tyrone, his troubled wife Mary and their two sons wrestle with resentment so deep-and a love so fierce-that it threatens to consume them. O'Neill's play is both a poem of forgiveness to his own family, and one of the legendary achievements of American drama.

Waters has attracted a slew of talent to Louisville for his maiden production as Artistic Director and has assembled a powerhouse of a cast all making their debuts at Actors Theatre. Long Day's Journey into Night will feature Michael Bakkensen as James Tyrone, Jr., John Brummer as Edmund Tyrone, David Chandler as James Tyrone and Lisa Emery as Mary Caban Tyrone.

Actors Theatre is thrilled to welcome performer Lisa Emery to Actors Theatre for the first time. An Obie award-winning actress, Emery is a highly sought after talent, with an impressive resume that spans more than three decades. A three time Lortel and Drama Desk nominee, her appearances on Broadway include Relatively Speaking, The Women and Present Laughter. Numbering among her many award-nominated Off-Broadway roles are The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Iron and Marvin's Room. Her resume also boasts a host of film and T.V. gigs including guest-star roles on Law & Order, Fringe, Damages, Sex and the City, Ed and Third Watch, and appeared in the films Rodger Dodger, A Map of the World, and Unfaithful, among others.

Chandler and Brummer most recently appeared in Waters' production of John Logan's Red at Berkeley Repertory Theatre where they played Mark Rothko and Ken respectively. Chandler's other credits include Heartbreak House (Berkeley Repertory Theatre), on Broadway; American Clock, Death of a Salesman and Lost in Yonkers, and he was seen in A Question of Mercy at London's Bush Theatre. He also appears frequently on film and television, at regional theatres, and at prestigious off-Broadway venues such as La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, MCC Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons and Second Stage Theatre. In addition to appearing alongside Chandler in Water's feverish production of Red at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Brummer-- a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina's M.F.A. program-- was a company member at PlayMakers Repertory Company where he played Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest and George in All My Sons, among many other roles.

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