Full cast and production team have been announced for City Lit’s season-closing production of MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL by T.S. Eliot, the Nobel Prize winner considered to be one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets. He is also acclaimed for his plays and essays, but today is probably best known as the author of the poems set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber for CATS. MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL dramatizes the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of knights loyal to King Henry II in 1170. City Lit’s production will be staged environmentally in the sanctuary of Edgewater Presbyterian Church, the building in which City Lit resides; and will feature an original musical score by Philip Seward. MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL will run from May 3rd through June 16th. Press opening will be May 12, 2024.
City Lit’s outgoing Producer and Artistic Director Terry McCabe, who is directing the play, has announced his cast. James Sparling (pictured), who has appeared in many City Lit productions, notably as Sherlock Holmes in such mysteries as THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and THE SEVEN PER-CENT SOLUTION, and most recently in 2023’s THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, will lead the cast as Becket.
The cast will also include Katarina Bakes (Chorus), John Blick (Second Priest), Kara Chandler (Chorus), Stephen Fedo (First Priest), Sean Harklerode (First Tempter/First Knight), Varris Holmes (Third Tempter, Third Knight), Robert Howard (Second Tempter/Second Knight), Zach Kunde (Messenger, Fourth Knight), Sally Olson (Chorus), Joel Thompson (Third Priest), and Isabel Schmitz (Chorus). The production team will be Mike McShane (lighting design), Patti Roeder (costume design), Paul Chakrin (fight choreography), and Carrie Hardin (dialect coach).
Eliot wrote MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL on commission to be performed in the sanctuary at Canterbury Cathedral, the room where Becket was murdered. His depiction of the killing draws from the eye-witness account of Edward Grim, a monk who was wounded trying to protect the Archbishop. It became one of the first live television dramas in history when televised in 1936 by the BBC during their first few months of operation. City Lit’s MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL will be the play’s first full production in Chicago of the play since the early 1950s (though there have been concert readings from time to time). The play dramatizes the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of knights loyal to Henry II in 1170.
Tickets for MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL are $30 for previews and $34 for regular performances and are on sale now at www.citylit.org. Senior prices are $25 for previews and $29 for regular performances. Students and military are $12.00 for all performances. Tickets may be ordered online at www.citylit.org or purchased over the phone by calling 773-293-3682.
LISTING INFORMATION
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
by T.S. Eliot
directed by Terry McCabe
World premiere score by Philip Seward
May 3 - June 16, 2024
Previews May 3 – May 11, 2024
Preview ticket prices $30.00, seniors $25.00, students and military $12.00 (all plus applicable fees)
Press Opening Sunday, May 12 at 3 pm
Regular run May 12 - June 16, 2024
Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm. Sundays at 3 pm. Mondays June 3 and 10 at 7:30 pm.
Regular run ticket prices $34.00, seniors $29.00, students and military $12 (all plus applicable fees)
Performances at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Chicago 60660
Info and tickets at www.citylit.org and by phone at 773-293-3682.
Murder in the Cathedral dramatizes the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of knights loyal to Henry II in 1170. Eliot wrote it on commission to be performed in the sanctuary at Canterbury Cathedral, the room where Becket was murdered; his depiction of the killing draws from the eye-witness account of Edward Grim, a monk who was wounded trying to protect the Archbishop. City Lit’s production will be staged in the sanctuary of Edgewater Presbyterian Church.
BIOS
Terry McCabe (Producer and Artistic Director, Director). has worked in Chicago theatre since 1980, when he assisted director Michael Maggio on a production of Moss Hart’s LIGHT UP THE SKY at Northlight, at the time called North Light Repertory Theatre. He joined the staff at the Body Politic Theatre in 1981 as assistant to artistic director James O’Reilly; two years later he used the money he made there to found Stormfield Theatre Company. Stormfield specialized in new plays by Chicago writers. Of its thirteen productions, eleven were world premieres, including the first three plays by future Tony-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan. Stormfield’s production of Logan’s HAUPTMANN was the first Chicago theatre production to play by invitation at the Edinburgh International Arts Festival, where it won a Fringe First award. When McCabe closed Stormfield in 1988, it had just won its second consecutive non-Equity Jeff for Best Production and was entirely debt-free.
From then until 2005, McCabe directed around Chicago on a free-lance basis at many theatres, including Victory Gardens Theater (where he forged a professional relationship with playwright Kristine Thatcher, now City Lit’s resident playwright, and from where his revival of HAUPTMANN transferred to off-Broadway), Court Theatre, National Jewish Theater, Body Politic (where he directed the Off-Loop movement’s first KING LEAR, with his former employer O’Reilly in the lead), Next Theatre, and Oak Park Festival Theatre. Among the many great Chicago actors he was privileged to work with during this period were William J. Norris, Barbara Robertson, Tom Mula, Thatcher, Nicholas Rudall, Stormfield alums Ann Whitney and Denis O’Hare, Linda Emond, Roger Mueller, Pauline Brailsford, Ernest Perry Jr, Alexandra Billings, and Gary Houston. He was also resident director at Wisdom Bridge Theatre for four years in the early 1990s, where he directed Hollis Resnick and Steve Carell in the world premiere of TOUR DE FARCE, a comedy by Kingsley Day and Philip LaZebnik that has since been produced across the country and in several European cities, and the Chicago premiere production of MY CHILDREN! MY AFRICA! by Athol Fugard, which transferred to Vienna’s English Theatre, thereby becoming the play’s Austrian premiere as well.
When he became City Lit’s artistic director in 2005, midway through its Season 25, it was a part-time theatre, dark for more than six months of each year. The board at the time had considered closing up shop altogether. Instead, they hired McCabe, who expanded the season and added ancillary programming (including the anti-censorship outreach program BOOKS ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK, now in its eighteenth year); to date he has either directed or overseen seventy-nine City Lit productions, most of them world premieres of either plays or literary adaptations. Among these premieres have been Frank Galati’s adaptation OF THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Thatcher’s plays THE SAFE HOUSE and THE BLOODHOUND LAW (part of City Lit’s five-year commemoration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial), Paul Edwards’s adaptations of PEYTON PLACE and a trio of Shirley Jackson novels, L.C. Bernadine and Spencer Huffman’s adaptation of the cowboy novel THE VIRGINIAN, Mark Pracht’s THE MARK OF KANE, the first in his trilogy of plays about the history of the comic book industry, Nicholas Rudall’s final translation of a Greek tragedy, PROMETHEUS BOUND, McCabe and Marissa McKown’s adaptation of surfing culture’s founding document, the novel GIDGET, Douglas Post’s plays SOMEBODY FOREIGN and THIRTY-TWO STORIES, and a handful of Sherlock Holmes adaptations by McCabe.
Mixed in with the world premieres have been revivals equally eclectic: Thatcher’s VOICE OF GOOD HOPE, about pioneering Black congresswoman Barbara Jordan; the first Chicago production in 120 years of Dion Boucicault’s LONDON ASSURANCE; Post’s musical adaptation of THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS; DASHIELL HAMLET, a film noir/Shakespeare mashup from 1980s Chicago co-written (and directed at City Lit) by Mike Nussbaum; OH BOY!, an almost forgotten Jerome Kern musical from 1917; Lope de Vega’s FUENTE OVEJUNA, from the Golden Age of Spanish drama; and Harold Pinter’s OLD TIMES and THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, among many others. Since 2016 he has also served as City Lit’s producer.
T.S. Eliot (Author) Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (1888 – 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th Century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.
Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from 1914 to 1915, which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish. It was followed by "The Waste Land" (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and “Four Quartets” (1943). He was also known for seven plays, particularly MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL (1935) and THE COCKTAIL PARTY (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".
ABOUT CITY LIT THEATER COMPANY:
City Lit is the seventh oldest theatre company in Chicago, behind only Goodman, Court, Northlight, Oak Park Festival, Steppenwolf, and Pegasus theatres. It was founded in 1979 with $210 pooled by Arnold Aprill, David Dillon, and Lorell Wyatt. For its current season, its 42nd, it operates with a budget slightly over $260,000. It was the first theatre in the nation devoted to stage adaptations of literary material. There were so few theatres in Chicago at the time of its founding that at City Lit’s launch event, the founders were able to read a congratulatory letter they had received from Tennessee Williams.
For four decades and counting, City Lit has explored fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoirs, songs, essays and drama in performance. A theatre that specializes in literary work communicates a commitment to certain civilizing influences—tradition imaginatively explored, a life of the mind, trust in an audience’s intelligence—that not every cultural outlet shares.
City Lit is located in the historic Edgewater Presbyterian Church building at 1020 West Bryn Mawr Avenue. Its work is supported in part by the MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Ivanhoe Theater Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Agency and is sponsored in part by A.R.T. League. An Illinois not-for-profit corporation and a 501(c)(3) federal tax-exempt organization, City Lit keeps ticket prices below the actual cost of producing plays and depends on the support of those who share its belief in the beauty and power of the spoken written word.