Frank's Home

Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert Falls continues his 20th Anniversary Season with the world premiere of Frank’s Home by Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Nelson, a lyrical, heartbreaking story about one of Chicago’s greatest, if less than perfect, visionaries. Frank’s Home features stage and screen star Peter Weller—perhaps best known for his starring role in the first two Robocop films—as Frank Lloyd Wright and Harris Yulin as Louis Sullivan, the famed Chicago-based architect who was a mentor to Wright. The cast of eight also includes Mary Beth Fisher as Miriam Noel, Wright’s longtime mistress and confidant; Jay Whittaker and Maggie Siff portray Wright’s adult children, Lloyd and Catherine, respectively. Frank’s Home runs through December 23, 2006 in the Owen Theatre. Frank’s Home is produced in association with New York’s Playwrights Horizons, where it will begin performances on January 12, 2007.

“I’m so pleased to again collaborate with Richard and a first-rate cast on this poignant new play about one of Chicago’s most venerated, but ill-famed, artists,” said director Robert Falls.  Added playwright Richard Nelson, “Frank Lloyd Wright was an artist who consistently flaunted convention—with his iconoclastic buildings that drew both praise and condemnation, and with his family.  I’m thrilled to return to the Goodman and excited to produce this play in a city where Wright and Sullivan’s influence is so clearly visible.”

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He moved to Chicago at the age of 20, finding work in the drafting room of Louis Sullivan at the architectural firm, Adler and Sullivan. An important mentor to the young architect, Sullivan encouraged Wright’s radical ideas and even loaned him money to build his first home in Oak Park. Wright soon earned national acclaim for his “prairie style” of architectural design, an approach that emphasized the horizontal lines of a structure, working in harmony with the flat terrain of the Midwest.

Frank’s Home peers into a moment in the tumultuous private life of this man who created a new architectural vocabulary, but couldn’t create a home for himself and his family. It is summer 1923, and Frank Lloyd Wright has recently left Chicago for California, determined to embrace Hollywood’s youthful zest, mend broken relationships with his adult children and revive his career. He has recently enjoyed the successful completion of his latest “wonder of the world,” Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, and is now poised to settle down and embrace his new home. But his splintered family still has deep-seeded resentments. Then news arrives of an earthquake in Japan that has crumbled Wright’s prized hotel to the ground. Or has it?

Chicago native playwright Richard Nelson—who earned a Tony Award for the musical he conceived, James Joyce’s The Dead—returns to Goodman Theatre where his adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters was staged by Falls in 1995. Nelson’s plays include Rodney’s Wife, Franny’s Way, Madame Melville, Goodnight Children Everywhere, Where I Come From, The General From America, Kenneth’s First Play, New England, Two Shakespearean Actors, Some Americans Abroad, Columbus and the Discovery of Japan, Left, Misha’s Party, Principia Scriptoriae and The Vienna Notes. In addition to James Joyce’s The Dead, Nelson’s musicals include My Life With Albertine and the forthcoming Hal Prince Musical, Paradise Lost. Adaptations include Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Tynan, Strindberg’s Miss Julie and The Father, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and Pirandello’s Enrico IV. His plays have been produced on Broadway and in London’s West End as well as off-Broadway and at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club, Lincoln Center Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, New York Stage & Film, Theater for a New Audience, The Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre of Great Britain, Yale Repertory, TimeLine Theatre Company, Huntington Theatre Company, Alley Theatre, Geffen Playhouse, American Conservatory Theatre San Francisco and Moscow Art Theater. He is an Honorary Associate Artist of the RSC and the Chair of the Playwriting Department of the Yale School of Drama.

Peter Weller makes his Goodman Theatre debut as architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Other Chicago credits include the premiere of David Mamet’s The Woods opposite Patti LuPone. Credits with Joseph Papp include David Rabe’s Tony Award-winning Sticks and Bones, also in London; Rabe’s Streamers directed by Mike Nichols and Tom Babe’s Rebel Women. Other New York credits include Lanford Wilson’s Serenading Louie with Diane Weist; Full Circle directed by Otto Preminger; William Inge’s Summer Brave with Alexis Smith; James Purdy’s Daddy Wolf and William Mastrosimone’s The Woolgatherer with Patricia Wettig. Weller’s film credits include Robocop, Leviathan, The Order, Mighty Aphrodite, Beyond the Clouds, Just Tell Me What You Want, Shoot the Moon, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, First Born, Shadow Hours (an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust), Naked Lunch, The New Age and Ivan’s XTC (Independent Spirit Award). Television credits include David Brown’s Tales of Seduction, Dorothy Parker’s Dusk Before Fireworks directed by Ken Russell and The Contaminated Man with William Hurt on HBO; Odyssey for Showtime; and the role of Christopher Henderson on FOX’s 24.

This season marks director Robert Falls’ 20th anniversary as artistic director of Goodman Theatre, where he most recently directed King Lear.  Later this season on Broadway, he will direct Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, featuring Liev Schreiber, Peter Hermann and Eric Jensen.  From 1977 to 1985, he served as artistic director of Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theatre.  Falls has directed some 30 major productions for the Goodman, including eight world premieres and eight plays that he subsequently remounted on Broadway and/or abroad. Two of his most highly acclaimed Broadway productions, Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (first staged at the Goodman in 1998 and 2002, respectively, and both starring his longtime collaborator Brian Dennehy) were honored with seven Tony Awards and three Drama Desk Awards.  Falls recently directed Oliver Platt, Brian O’Byrne and Martha Plimpton in the American premiere of Conor McPherson’s Shining City, which opened on Broadway last spring and received two Tony Award nominations.  Also during the 2005/2006 season, he directed David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre for the Goodman, as well as the London revival of Death of a Salesman.  His production of Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida for Walt Disney Theatricals, which ran on Broadway for four years, is currently playing in Germany, Japan and South Korea.  For the Goodman’s 2004/2005 season, Falls directed the world premiere of Arthur Miller’s final play, Finishing the Picture; the world premiere of Rebecca Gilman’s Dollhouse; and Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie. 

Tickets to Frank’s Home are $10 to $35 and may be purchased online at GoodmanTheatre.org, at the Goodman Theatre Box Office, 170 North Dearborn Street, or charged by phoning 312.443.3800.