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What is TIME AND THE CONWAYS All About? Elizabeth McGovern & Company Explain!
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Nov 4, 2022
Roundabout Theatre Company will soon present Time and the Conways by J. B. Priestley, directed by Tony winner Rebecca Taichman (Indecent). Time and the Conways returns to Broadway for the first time since its premiere in 1938. BroadwayWorld has a sneak peek at the company in rehearsal below!
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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Roundabout Theatre Company kicks off their fall season with the first Broadway revival of the 1938
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time-traveling J.B. Priestley play, Time and the Conways. It welcomes back to Broadway
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Downton Abbey star Elizabeth McGovern. It will open on October 10th at the American Airlines Theatre
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under the direction of Rebecca Tashpin. And I caught up with both of them during a break in rehearsal
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How excited are you? So excited. And I feel like I couldn't be coming back in better hands and in a better way than in Time in the Conways with Rebecca Tachman directing and this completely fantastic cast to be riding in on the magic carpet with
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So I'm really lucky. What's it been like working on this when you first got the play
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What made you say, yes, I want to do this? It's a play that I hadn't heard about and I wasn't expecting anything because I had this impression of J.B. Priestley that was very firm in my mind as being one thing
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But this is different for him. It's for me a lot more subtle and complex than I have associated his plays to be
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it's a very very interesting magic piece of theater looking at family life over the course
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of many years and I just wanted to be part of bringing that to life and reminding people
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that it exists and and how great it is what an incredible cast you're going to get ready to work
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with what's the rehearsal room been like for you going back into a theatrical rehearsal room
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Well, it's so much fun. I mean it's so much fun with Rebecca, who is so loving and has
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such a great imagination and is so intelligent. And with this cast that I would consider to
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be just perfect Everyone is so good for their part and they all such good actors So I really it so rare when everything lines up in quite the way it has on this occasion And so I just pinching myself
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This is the first Broadway revival. It's such a beautiful play. Yes, since 1938. So it was written in 37. It was done here in New York in 1938
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And I think the audiences will be shocked, as I am, by just how unbelievably relevant it feels
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and familiar it feels to us today. It's a time-traveling play. It is. It moves through the interwar years in Britain
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So it starts right at the end of World War I, and it takes us to the brink of World War II
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And it does this sort of move through time in a very kind of theatrical, beautiful, strange way
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that invites us, he's briefly through that, is inviting us to think of time in a different way
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to think of our lives instead of as this sort of linear stream of time that's moving ever forward
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as this kind of multiple event in which past, present, and future are all sort of simultaneously existing
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You are known to millions of fans around the world for your beautiful work on Downton Abbey
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And a lot of those fans will be coming to the theater for the very first time because they're going to come see you in it
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You'll remember that first time. What does that all mean to you? Well, if even one person came to their first play, because they were a fan of Downton Abbey
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I would be on my knees with gratitude because I think the theatre in a person's life is
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so enriching and it really opens up your brain and your imagination in ways that not everything does
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and there's a kind of an energy to it that once you discover it it's hard to walk away from
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And so if there was even one person that discovered theatre in that way I would feel so grateful and happy
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