TRUMBO: Red, White & Blacklisted

Red, White and Blacklisted - A play by Christopher Trumbo

Plainfield Arts, the new moniker of Friends of Plainfield Opera House, is proud to present Red White and Blacklisted on Feb 10, 11 and 12 at POH. Friday and Saturday shows are at 7 pm and Sunday’s is at 4 pm.

Tickets for all shows are available online and at the door. Suggested donation - $20.

www.plainfieldoperahousevt.org

plainfieldtownhall@gmail.com - 802 498-3173

A dynamic team of artists and a scholar/artist have teamed up to bring the Oscar winning screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo’s words to life. The play, written by Trumbo’s son Christopher, is a two person play and features a series of Trumbo’s letters and speeches. 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 pro-Monica Callan. Rick Winston, founder of Montpelier’s Savoy Theater and author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains: The McCarthy Era in Vermont 1946-1960, is serving as the show's dramaturg.

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—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. The play was turned into a documentary film in 2007.

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. Bruce Weber, reviewing Christopher Trumbo’s play for the New York Times in 2003, said, “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.”