World class talents bring A Celebration of Pinter to Monmouth U in October

(WEST LONG BRANCH, NJ) --The Center for the Arts at Monmouth University has announced that tickets are now on sale for Julian Sands in A Celebration of Harold Pinter — a witty and compelling look into the work of the Nobel Prize winning British dramatist that brings some visionary talents to the West Long Branch campus on October 18, 2013.

Scheduled to take place inside the Pollak Theatre, the 8 p.m. show represents the exclusive New Jersey engagement of the international touring production, a critically acclaimed solo show performed by stage and screen actor Julian Sands, under the supervision of Emmy and Obie winning actor, producer, and director John Malkovich.

Described as "an evening of Homeric theater with an extraordinary actor, great words, and an audience," A Celebration… arrives on the heels of the 83rd birthday of Pinter (1930-2008), the Olivier Award winning playwright best known for bracing, emotionally devastating dramas like "Betrayal," "The Caretaker" and "The Birthday Party." An Oscar nominated screenwriter ("The French Lieutenant's Woman," "The Servant," "The Last Tycoon") and a supporting player in "The Tailor of Panama" and "Mansfield Park," Pinter was a politically outspoken public figure whose acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 was marked by controversy between the writer and his equally blunt opponents in academia and the media.

First seen at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and nominated for a 2013 Drama Desk Award, this is a Celebration that focuses upon a relatively little known aspect of the Nobel laureate's work — his poems and "political prose," presented here in a setting that's augmented by the first-person reflections of the performer who was hand-picked by Pinter for this project — Julian Sands.

The dashing, blond-maned Sands made his first big impression in the 1985 Merchant-Ivory production "A Room With a View," and over the course of a 25 year film and TV career has appeared as everyone from Percy Bysshe Shelley and Franz Liszt, to the Phantom of the Opera and Superman's father. Soon to be seen in a featured role on the upcoming eighth season of the Showtime series "Dexter," Sands was commissioned by Pinter in 2005 to present a special program of the playwright's poetry in London — and in the process was granted a close-up perspective on the literary lion's outlook, work and personality in the final years of his life.

Some three years after the playwright's death from cancer, Sands revisited the words of Pinter — working closely with Malkovich, the founding member of Chicago's celebrated Steppenwolf Theatre Company whose own career on the stage ("Death of a Salesman," "Burn This," "True West") and screen ("Dangerous Liaisons," "Empire of the Sun," "The Glass Menagerie" and, of course, "Being John Malkovich") include Academy Award nominated turns in "Places in the Heart" and "In the Line of Fire."

For the production that has traveled to cities from New York, Chicago and LA to London, Paris and Budapest, Sands and Malkovich have crafted a warmly humorous, elegantly unadorned presentation that "gets to the soul of the man…poet, playwright, husband, political activist, Nobel winner, mortal."

Tickets for Julian Sands in A Celebration of Harold Pinter are priced at $25 and $37 and can be reserved through the Monmouth University Center for the Arts Box Office at 732-263-6889, or online at www.monmouth.edu/arts. Tickets for the entire 2013-2014 Performing Arts series at Monmouth University go on sale July 1, 2013.