Rebecca Schull - Journey Into The Whirlwind

REBECCA SCHULL is one of the country’s leading character actresses. Her recent film appearances include two Oscar nominated films, United 93 directed by Paul Greengrass and The Little Children with Kate Winslet as well as the critically acclaimed independent film Flannel Pajamas, which premiered at Sundance. She also appeared in Analyze This and Analyze That with Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro, My Life with Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman, and Odd Couple ll with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Familiar to television audiences as Fay in the hit NBC series, Wings, she has guest-starred in numerous series: Law & Order, Law & Order Special Victims Unit, Frasier, Eisenhower and Lutz and Roseanne. Her movies of the week credits include: Holiday in Your Heart, Presumed Guilty, Mortal Fear and Stone Pillow. Her extensive theatre credits include appearances on Broadway: 45 Seconds from Broadway by Neil Simon, directed by Jerry Zaks; Golda, directed by Arthur Penn and Herzl, produced by Dory Schary. Her Off Broadway credits include: I Can’t Remember Anything, part of the Arthur Miller retrospective at Signature Theatre directed by Joe Chaikin, Habitat, Little Eyolf, Naked, Nest of the Woodgrouse directed by Joe Papp, Fefu and Her Friends, written and directed by Maria Irene Fornes and Mary Stuart directed by Des McAnuff. Her regional theatre credits include Factory Girls at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Bay Street Theatre, The Matchmaker (Dramalog Award) and Macbeth both directed by Des McAnuff at LaJolla Playhouse, The Greeks directed by Mark Lamos at Hartford Stage, The Seagull at the Whole Theatre Co., Richard ll at Yale Repertory Theatre and Fugue at the Long Wharf Theatre. She studied at Dublin’s Stanislavski Studio and appeared at the Dublin Focus Theatre in John Gabriel Borkman and A Delicate Balance for which she received the Hibernia Award for Best Actress. She reprised her role in I Can’t Remember Anything at the Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe. Ms. Schull adapted and premiered Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind at Trinity College in Dublin. Journey into the Whirlwind was subsequently produced at The CAST Theatre in Los Angeles and the American Jewish Theater in New York. There were additional performances at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center and at the Irish Arts Center sponsored by Amnesty International. Ms. Schull was the founder and artistic director of New York’s Open World Theatre Company which presented readings of works of playwrights from abroad that were denied production in their countries of origin due to censorship. She is a member of The Actors’ Studio.

Press Release
Rebecca Schull in Journey into the Whirlwind
timely as CNN / timeless as theatre

“Exceptional!” The Los Angeles Times

“Can this be entertaining? You bet!” Variety

Journalist and professor of History, Eugenia Ginzburg is at home with her husband and two young sons when she is summoned to an interrogation. She cannot imagine what lies before her as one of the millions of victims of Stalin’s purge of the Communist Party in the late 1930s. A stalwart Communist, she initially rationalizes what is happening to her as some terrible error. The delusion is short-lived. She is sentenced as a traitor and spends eighteen years in the Gulag system: first in the notorious Lefortovo and Butyrka prisons and ultimately the work camp of Kolyma.

Upon her release and return to Moscow in 1955, she began work on Journey into the Whirlwind chronicling those years. With the instinct of a novelist and the precision of a journalist, she brings to light and to life the day-to-day reality of the Gulag. Ginzburg insisted that her memoir was a testament to her fellow prisoners who did not survive, the countless hundreds with whom she shared precious months, weeks or hours.

Rebecca Schull’s performance never solicits sympathy but secures it with a delicate yet powerful portrayal which is quiet to the core. The drama lies in the precision with which Ms. Schull recounts the ordeal — the ordinariness of consenting to the interrogation, the degree of hoarseness in a voice denied conversation, the tendency of prisons to grow cleaner and guards more polite the closer an inmate draws to death, the exact moment when memories can no longer be held at bay. She summons up her comrades: her fellow prisoners as well as a gallery of malignant bureaucrats, implacable judges “like fish in aspic,” and guards skeptical of the power of poetry. Scenes spill forth, treasures stored during the long, stifled years. Schull reveals a woman whose heroism is rooted in an ability to fix in her memory the everyday tedium and assaults of oppression and still to remain unalterably herself.



		Quotes :: Biography :: Press Release :: Download Journey Into the Whirlwind Press Packet (pdf)



			BACK TO TOP




	BACK TO TOP

				Rebecca Schull BIOGRAPHY REBECCA SCHULL is one of the country’s leading character actresses. Her recent film appearances include two Oscar nominated films, United 93 directed by Paul Greengrass and The Little Children with Kate Winslet as well as the critically acclaimed independent film Flannel Pajamas, which premiered at Sundance. She also appeared in Analyze This and Analyze That with Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro, My Life with Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman, and Odd Couple ll with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Familiar to television audiences as Fay in the hit NBC series, Wings, she has guest-starred in numerous series: Law & Order, Law & Order Special Victims Unit, Frasier, Eisenhower and Lutz and Roseanne. Her movies of the week credits include: Holiday in Your Heart, Presumed Guilty, Mortal Fear and Stone Pillow. Her extensive theatre credits include appearances on Broadway: 45 Seconds from Broadway by Neil Simon, directed by Jerry Zaks; Golda, directed by Arthur Penn and Herzl, produced by Dory Schary. Her Off Broadway credits include: I Can’t Remember Anything, part of the Arthur Miller retrospective at Signature Theatre directed by Joe Chaikin, Habitat, Little Eyolf, Naked, Nest of the Woodgrouse directed by Joe Papp, Fefu and Her Friends, written and directed by Maria Irene Fornes and Mary Stuart directed by Des McAnuff. Her regional theatre credits include Factory Girls at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Bay Street Theatre, The Matchmaker (Dramalog Award) and Macbeth both directed by Des McAnuff at LaJolla Playhouse, The Greeks directed by Mark Lamos at Hartford Stage, The Seagull at the Whole Theatre Co., Richard ll at Yale Repertory Theatre and Fugue at the Long Wharf Theatre. She studied at Dublin’s Stanislavski Studio and appeared at the Dublin Focus Theatre in John Gabriel Borkman and A Delicate Balance for which she received the Hibernia Award for Best Actress. She reprised her role in I Can’t Remember Anything at the Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe. Ms. Schull adapted and premiered Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind at Trinity College in Dublin. Journey into the Whirlwind was subsequently produced at The CAST Theatre in Los Angeles and the American Jewish Theater in New York. There were additional performances at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center and at the Irish Arts Center sponsored by Amnesty International. Ms. Schull was the founder and artistic director of New York’s Open World Theatre Company which presented readings of works of playwrights from abroad that were denied production in their countries of origin due to censorship. She is a member of The Actors’ Studio. BACK TO TOP Press Release Rebecca Schull in Journey into the Whirlwind timely as CNN / timeless as theatre “Exceptional!” The Los Angeles Times “Can this be entertaining? You bet!” Variety Journalist and professor of History, Eugenia Ginzburg is at home with her husband and two young sons when she is summoned to an interrogation. She cannot imagine what lies before her as one of the millions of victims of Stalin’s purge of the Communist Party in the late 1930s. A stalwart Communist, she initially rationalizes what is happening to her as some terrible error. The delusion is short-lived. She is sentenced as a traitor and spends eighteen years in the Gulag system: first in the notorious Lefortovo and Butyrka prisons and ultimately the work camp of Kolyma. Upon her release and return to Moscow in 1955, she began work on Journey into the Whirlwind chronicling those years. With the instinct of a novelist and the precision of a journalist, she brings to light and to life the day-to-day reality of the Gulag. Ginzburg insisted that her memoir was a testament to her fellow prisoners who did not survive, the countless hundreds with whom she shared precious months, weeks or hours. Rebecca Schull’s performance never solicits sympathy but secures it with a delicate yet powerful portrayal which is quiet to the core. The drama lies in the precision with which Ms. Schull recounts the ordeal — the ordinariness of consenting to the interrogation, the degree of hoarseness in a voice denied conversation, the tendency of prisons to grow cleaner and guards more polite the closer an inmate draws to death, the exact moment when memories can no longer be held at bay. She summons up her comrades: her fellow prisoners as well as a gallery of malignant bureaucrats, implacable judges “like fish in aspic,” and guards skeptical of the power of poetry. Scenes spill forth, treasures stored during the long, stifled years. Schull reveals a woman whose heroism is rooted in an ability to fix in her memory the everyday tedium and assaults of oppression and still to remain unalterably herself.

		BACK TO TOP
c200 9 Poetry In Motion