December 9, 2003
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
A fascinating Evening with Andre Gregory features a screening of the film My Dinner with Andre at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- An Evening with Andre Gregory
- Featuring a screening of My Dinner with Andre
- Acclaimed actor and director Gregory will make an enthralling presentation before a screening of the classic film
- Thursday, January 15
- 7:30 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public: $10 / UCSB students: $8
- Tickets & Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Theater director, actor and story-teller extraordinaire Andre Gregory will give a fascinating presentation and introduce the mesmerizing film classic My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981, 101 minutes), co-starring Wallace Shawn, on Thursday, January 15 at 7:30 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall.
The film My Dinner with Andre has been called “the only movie entirely devoid of clichés” by Roger Ebert, and it remains the public defining moment for Andre Gregory. Although the film is scripted by playwright Wallace Shawn from taped conversations between the two who meet several times a week for several months, the atmosphere could not be more fresh and spontaneous. Gregory regales Shawn with his tales of dropping out to find transcendence throughout the globe, from Poland to Long Island, from the Sahara to Scotland. Time Out London asserts, “Gregory’s account of his spiritual odyssey becomes a magical mystery tour of thoughts, dreams, fantasies and emotions. Riveting, exhilarating stuff.”
Andre Gregory grew up not just in Hollywood but among the Hollywood elite; he has claimed he could “look out of our window and see Garbo and Dietrich and Flynn and Thomas Mann playing doubles.” He attended Harvard hoping to become an actor and also studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio. Finding little success as an actor he almost attended law school, but instead tried directing, discovering a niche in avant-garde theater. Soon after staging Jean Genet’s The Blacks Off-Broadway in 1962, he set up his own theater projects in both Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
In 1968 Gregory began his most important undertaking in theater when he founded The Manhattan Project. This experimental group staged, among other works, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night. Its premier production was an offbeat and highly popular take on Alice in Wonderland, developed from three years of rehearsals, which later toured internationally and earned Gregory both a special OBIE Award and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director.
Gregory desired to return to acting, and the opening that he needed presented itself when he and Shawn collaborated on the acclaimed art-house hit My Dinner with Andre. The success of the film led to the acting career Gregory had always wanted, as he went on to appear onstage opposite his daughter Marina in The Tempest and on Broadway in the Neil Simon farce Rumors. His film roles have ranged from a charismatic reverend in Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast (1986) to John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) brought his film career full circle, re-teaming him with Malle and Shawn in a stunning version of the Chekhov classic that Gregory had directed as a workshop theatrical production in New York at irregular intervals from 1989 to 1993. The production featured renowned actor and Santa Barbara resident George Gaynes. “This live-wire Vanya,” Rolling Stone asserts, “is fiercely funny, touching and vital.”
Recently Gregory has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. The New York Times quoted him as saying, “I don’t think it’s an accident that in totalitarian societies they always arrest the artists first, though we don’t seem particularly dangerous. I think the responsibility of the artist, each of us in our way, is to tell the truth. And the truth generally involves a great deal of ambiguity, and in times of war ambiguity and paradox are the first things to go. People want simple black and white answers.”
This event is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Tickets are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students and available in advance, and at the door, starting at 6:30 pm, if still available.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.