Photo Flash: Stolen Chair Presents Jody Flader in THE BACHELORS' TEA PARTY

A surreal society comedy performed at Lady Mendl's Tea Salon by two actors and four dolls alongside an exquisite five-course tea service, The Bachelors' Tea Party offers a look into the social circle of New York's first power couple, Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl) and Bessie Marbury.

To inaugurate its 10th anniversary season, Stolen Chair has partnered with Lady Mendl's Tea Salon to offer a unique theatrical experience, "tea theatre." Stolen Chair will pair its 15th original work, The Bachelors' Tea Party, with a classic five-course tea service. Written by Stolen Chair's resident playwright, Kiran Rikhye, and directed by Jon Stancato (Martin Denton, NYtheatre.com), the play stars Stolen Chair veteran Liz Eckert (Stage Kiss and Kinderspiel), who is joined onstage by Jody Flader (The Vineyard Theater's Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island).

The Bachelors' Tea Party is an absurd and absurdly intimate new comedy inspired by the relationships of Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl) and Bessie Marbury, who referred to themselves as "The Bachelors," after they took up joint residence sans men in the first years of the 20th century. Before she invented the profession of interior decorator, de Wolfe was a struggling Broadway performer, known more for her costumes than her acting, and her partner Bessie Marbury, legendary agent and broker, was introducing America to Oscar Wildeand discovering Cole Porter. In a playfully perverse take on a young girl's imaginary tea party, de Wolfe and Marbury will delight and torment each other and entertain a coterie of special guests, "performed" by dolls assembled around the table, with audience members seated only inches away.

Stolen Chair is a theatre laboratory dedicated to the creation of playfully intellectual, wickedly irreverent, and exuberantly athletic original works. Plundering the pop culture of the past half millennium, Stolen Chair's aesthetically promiscuous work recycles and reinvents old genres and stories to discover new ways to challenge and delight contemporary audiences.

For tickets and more information, visit http://www.stolenchair.org or call 212-410-2830. 

Photo credit: The Stolen Chair Theatre Company