Faye Dunaway will play a fellow Oscar-winning screen legend on Broadway next year. The Network and Bonnie and Clyde star will star in Matthew Lombardo's Tea at Five, taking on the iconic role of Katharine Hepburn. John Tillinger, who helmed the original Kate Mulgrew-led production in 2002, will direct the limited engagement.
Ben Feldman will produce the new staging of the monologue play. Additional information, including dates, a theatre, and full creative team, will be announced at a later date. Additionally, Lombardo has revealed to Playbill that the production is eyeing a three-week out-of-town tryout before heading to Broadway.
As previously reported, the bioplay had been optioned for Broadway last year by Ken Fakler. At the time, Lombardo was at work on crafting a new version of the piece, which would streamline the two-act format into 90 minutes and focus primarily on Hepburn in 1983 as she recovers from her car accident injury and looks back on her famed romance with Spencer Tracy.
Dunaway, an Oscar winner for Network (a stage adaptation of which currently plays Broadway), last appeared on Broadway in 1982's The Curse of an Aching Heart. She is of course no stranger to playing iconic performers, having portrayed Maria Callas in the national tour of Master Class and Joan Crawford in the infamous 1981 drama Mommie Dearest. Her additional credits include Oscar-nominated performances in Chinatown and Bonnie and Clyde and Broadway turns in The Changeling and After the Fall.
