Saturday, October 6, 2018

1980s Play

a closeup of Shelley from a 1983 cast pic for the play Close Ties

When Shelley left Charlie's Angels, she immediately jumped into doing theater. Without any prior experience, she took up the challenge and triumphed on stage, surprising many of her critics. She received glowing reviews for her stage work. One of them was Close Ties by Elizabeth Diggs. The play goes as follows (a summary from IMDB):

"For the first time in a long while, the entire Frye family has gathered in the family's summer home in the Berkshires. Grandmother Josephine Whitaker has always presided over her household with old-fashioned forcefulness, but lately, at 84, has been suffering from a frightening forgetfulness that may be senility. At first, her daughter, Bess Frye, and Bess' four grown children, Anna, Evelyn, Connie and Thayer, try to deny the problem's seriousness, but the signs cannot be ignored - Josephine sometimes converses with her dead husband, and once, when left alone for a few days, she went without eating."

The play was filmed for TV and was aired over The Entertainment Channel on March of 1983. It starred:

Anne Seymour - Josephine
Joyce Ebert - Bess
Alan Oppenheimer - Watson
Shelley Hack - Anna
Kim Darby - Evelyn
Christopher Guest - Ira
Ann Dusenberry - Connie
John Shepherd - Thayer

 Shelley with the cast of the play Close Ties, 1983
(from left) Alan Oppenheimer, Ann Dusenberry, Shelley Hack,
Anne Seymour, Kim Darby, Christopher Guest, Joyce Ebert
(seated in front) John Shepherd