TUESDAY WELL'D: 8/12/25
A TANGIER GALLERY
1.
A Cherry tree sculpted from recycled paper by Tangier artist Laura Drugea which stood at the entrance to the pool area of Veere Grenney’s estate, Gazebo, before the one-night-only performance a month ago of The Cherry Orchard directed by Rob Ashford which starred, among others, Gillian Anderson, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Dockery, Luke Thallon, Samuel West, and Penelope Wilton. At the end of the evening - after the hour-long picnic on the grounds during the interval which reminded me of my visit to Glyndebourne with David Hockney back in the 1970s when he had designed the sets for The Magic Flute and we had picnicked with our friends during that interval as is the custom there - the audience exited to see that the tree had been chopped in-half and the portion of it with the cherry blossoms lay on the ground. As we began our initial ascent after the production up the stairwell within the many landscaped levels of Venney’s glorious gardens, a shower of cherry blossoms gently rained down upon us tossed from above by production assistants hidden on the roof of one of Gazebo’s pool houses. It was all rather magical itself in its design.
The evening is a charitable one spearheaded by Madison Cox and this year, its tenth, Madison told us in his welcoming speech that it was to be in memory of three people who had meant so much to the annual event.
Dirk Michel was a loyal benefactor along with his wife, Blue.
Anthea Pender Mynott, the wife of British portraitist and illustrator Lawrence Mynott, was a gifted graphic artist whose dedication to the Tangiers Charity Plays, as these evenings are known, was seen in her designs for the programs over the years. The one that night described her as having been its “heartbeat behind the scenes.”
And then there was Linda Lavin “who starred in our first production,” Ashford had told me earlier that week on the patio of his garden when I visited him at his French Colonial home, Villa Léon l’Africain, which he shares with his husband, Kevin Ryan. The villa, once owned by Christopher Gibbs, was purchased by Pierre Bergé in 2007 after having visited Jacques Grange who had rented it for the season. Cox, who married Bergé in 2017, designed the garden in which we were sitting. “Linda played Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer. Ruth Wilson was Catharine,” Rob continued. “Tennessee Williams wrote much of that play here in Tangier. We staged it where we’re sitting and the audience - only about 80 people at that point - sat out there in the garden which Madison designed, in fact, based on Sebastian’s in Suddenly Last Summer.”
Dirk. Anthea. Linda. With each name Cox invoked, he fought back tears.
With that - fought-back tears among the chosen few and those of us whom they’d welcomed into their fold - the Chekhov, mirroring us, began.
This all was just a prompt for my further thoughts on this evening which you can read in my story at Airmail. You can also see even more photos taken by Johnny Rozsa, Joseph Andrew Hanson, and me. I am grateful that I was asked to write a piece about it for such a widely read, widely admired site. (Airmail.news)
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