Performance will benefit CooperRiis
by Jeff Byrd
A great novel does not necessarily a great play make, at least not on the first try.
The results of a second try, however, can be surprisingly good, as theater-goers in Tryon will see Saturday, Sept. 29 at 7 p.m. when actress Jane Holding and novelist Allan Gurganus bring their one-woman play, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow: Her Confessions,” to the Tryon Fine Arts Center.
Gurganus’ 1989 novel, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and sold more than four million copies. It was made into a television play on CBS with Cicely Tyson winning one of its four Emmy Awards as best supporting actress.
However, when the book was adapted by Martin Tahse into a one-woman play on Broadway in 2003, starring Ellen Burstyn, it closed after just one regular performance. The show held the record for fastest turn around from opening to closing until May 6, 2008 when “Glory Days” closed immediately after its opening night.
Some weeks after seeing previews of the show in New York, Gurganus and Holding, friends since their teenage years, were eating a meal together and talking with others in their local community theater group, the Hillsborough version of the Tryon Little Theater.
That’s when adapted version two was born.
“We have an amateur theater group here and we do staged readings together,” Holding explains. “We did shows like ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ – I was Big Momma and Allan was Big Daddy.”