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Translated by: Jeremy Sams
Directed by: Sean Mathias
Incidental Music by: Jason Carr
Les Parents Terribles Original Written by: Jean Cocteau
Previews from April 3rd 1995
April 27th 1995 – November 4th 1995
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Broadway
AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
1995 Theatre World Award® Winner - Jude Law
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Actor in Play - Roger Rees
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Actress in Play - Eileen Atkins
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Featured Actor in Play - Jude Law
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Featured Actress in Play - Cynthia Nixon
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Scenic Design
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Costume Design
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Lighting Design
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Direction of a Play
1995 Tony Award® Nominee - Best Play
1995 Drama Desk Award® Nominee - Outstanding Actor in Play – Roger Rees
1995 Drama Desk Award® Nominee - Outstanding Costume Design
1995 Drama Desk Award® Nominee - Outstanding Lighting Design
1995 Drama Desk Award® Nominee - Outstanding Set Design
1995 Drama Desk Award® Nominee - Outstanding Director of Play
1995 Drama Desk Award® Nominee - Outstanding Revival
SYNOPSIS
The setting is prewar, 1938, Paris rambunctiously self-absorbed and unaware of the coming deluge. Though the members of this family are eccentric and live in epic visible squalor, they are bourgeois to the core, inhabiting a big, handsome apartment in a placidly bourgeois arrondissement. Their income is modest and fixed, a legacy from a long-dead uncle. They include Yvonne, a self-dramatizing diabetic and slob, who spends most of her time in or on her bed, sometimes cuddling a teddy bear. She is sustained only by her obsessive love for Michael, her pretty, alarmingly innocent son who, though 22 years old, is emotionally no more than 11. The complacent husband and father is George, an inventor still perfecting his underwater machine gun in the broom closet he uses as a laboratory. Their benign keeper is Yvonne's older sister Leonie, called Leo, chic, wise and serenely sane.
It's not easy for Leo. She still loves George, to whom she was engaged before he fell in love with and married Yvonne. Rather than lose him completely, she has remained a member of the household. She's the family confidante, effective parent to them all, and controller of the exchequer. In her own unknowing way, she's also responsible, at least in part, for the situation that ultimately shatters the family: Michael comes home one morning to announce that he has fallen in love, news that only Leo greets with any satisfaction. Yvonne erupts with the volcanic fury of a spurned fishwife. George reacts with dismay. He realizes that Madeleine, the bookbinder his son adores, is the young woman he has been keeping with money borrowed from Leo, which Madeleine, in turn, has been passing on to Michael. Says George, after confessing all to Leo, "How can it happen in a city of this size?" For the rest of the three acts, Yvonne and George, with Leo's cooperation initially, scheme to separate the lovers.
(Synopsis taken from Vincent Canby/NYTimes)
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OPENING NIGHT CAST
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Eileen Atkins
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Leonie (Leo)
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Roger Rees
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George
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Kathleen Turner
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Yvonne
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Jude Law
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Michael
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Cynthia Nixon
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Madeleine
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UNDERSTUDIES
Leonie – Sandra Shipley
George - Lewis Arlt
Yvonne - Leslie Hendrix
Michael – Jim Stanek
Madeleine – Carrie Preston
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