Veteran actor Stacy Keach will return to the stage in July to attend to a bit of unfinished business. The veteran actor will return to the role of author Ernest Hemingway in Jim McGrath’s world-premiere solo drama Pamplona, which is set to play Chicago’s Goodman Theatre July 10–August 19.
Keach was appearing in Pamplona last spring when he fell ill onstage during the opening night performance. The performance was halted, and the Goodman ultimately canceled the entire run of the play when Keach's doctors determined that the veteran actor had experienced an onstage heart attack.
Read: OPENING NIGHT PERFORMANCE OF GOODMAN’S PAMPLONA SUSPENDED AFTER STACY KEACH FALLS ILL
The Goodman stated at the time that a complete recovery was expected following a period of cardiac rehabilitation and rest. Keach later told the Chicago Tribune that he had an unfulfilled obligation “to the play, to the city and to myself.”
“I’m thrilled to reunite with Stacy Keach and Jim McGrath for what I know will be a triumphant return to this beautifully rendered work about one of our most charismatic yet complicated literary titans—and a Chicagoland native—Ernest Hemingway,” said Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert Falls, who is also the play’s director.
Thirty-three years ago Keach was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Emmy Award for playing the author in a 1988 television miniseries titled Hemingway. Keach and Falls previously collaborated on Finishing the Picture and King Lear at the Goodman.
“After the prize comes the pressure,” read press notes for Pamplona. “Basking in the glory of career-defining awards—the 1953 Pulitzer Prize and the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954—legendary writer Ernest Hemingway insists his best work is yet to come. Five years later, holed up in a Spanish hotel with a looming deadline, he struggles to knock out a story about the rivalrous matadors of Pamplona. But his real battles lie outside the bullfighting arena; in declining health, consumed by his troubled fourth marriage and tormented by the specter of past glories, he must now conquer the deepening despair that threatens to engulf him.”
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