Stockard Channing to star in Awake and Sing!

By Amy Somensky May 23, 2007, 13:14 GMT

03/09/2007 - Stockard Channing - 56th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards - Arrivals - Shrine Auditorium - Los Angeles, CA © Scott Alan / Photorazzi

London: Michael Attenborough, Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre, will direct Stockard Channing in Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!. The production will run at the Almeida from August 31st through October 20th. Opening night is set for September 6th.  Further casting for will be announced shortly.

Starkly dramatic and vividly comic, Awake and Sing! tells the story of the Bergers, a lower-middle-class, three-generation Jewish family living in a Bronx apartment during the 1930's. The family, ruled over by strong-willed matriarch Bessie, long for a better world for themselves. True to life in his depiction of the extreme economic hardships confronted by working-class immigrant families during the 1930s, Odets documents their travails and their hopes, capturing the frenetic, pressured existence in this crowded home.

Award-winning American stage, film and television actor Stockard Channing will play Bessie. Her London theatre credits include The Exonerated at Riverside Studios and Six Degrees of Separation for the Royal Court, which transferred to the Comedy Theatre. Her New York theatre work includes Hapgood, Six Degrees of Separation and House of Blue Leaves all for the Lincoln Center, Love Letters at the Promenade Theater, Women in Mind for Manhattan Theatre Club and Joe Egg at the Longacre Theatre, for which she won a Tony Award. On television she is best know for her role as First Lady Abbey Bartlett in the hugely popular US drama series, The West Wing. Her film credits include Six Degrees of Separation for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Up Close and Personal, Moll Flanders, Bright Young Things, Business of Strangers and Grease, in which she played Rizzo.