A Cultivated Friendship: A Staged Reading at The Mount and the Fine Arts Work Center
Picture Paris in the early 1930s: Edith Wharton, the grande dame of American literature, tending roses at her summer home, and a young Midwestern novelist, Louis Bromfield, coaxing dahlias and lettuces from the soil of a crumbling French rectory. Separated by thirty years in age and divided by politics, the two became fast friends—not through books, but through gardens.
This surprising bond is at the heart of A Cultivated Friendship, a new play by John Dennis Anderson and Karen Vuranch. The playwrights will perform staged readings this September at two celebrated venues.
Two Venues… Two Readings…
The Mount (Lenox, MA): Wednesday, September 10, 2025 at 5:00 PM
The Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA): Friday, September 12, 2025 · 6:00 PM
Friendship Among the Flowers
“It is rather blasphemous to leave a garden between June & Oct,” Wharton once teased Bromfield in a letter. Their correspondence—full of peas, dahlias, and late frosts—was less about writing than about the pleasures and frustrations of cultivating beauty from the earth.
That distinctive rapport, both witty and tender, provides the foundation for A Cultivated Friendship, which interweaves fact and fiction to dramatize their unlikely but enduring connection.
The Playwrights
John Dennis Anderson, a native Texan living on Cape Cod, is a performance studies scholar and Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Communication Studies at Emerson College, where he taught for 27 years. He presents interactive solo performances as writers Henry James, William Faulkner, Washington Irving, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and others as well as Louis Bromfield. His plays Isherwood, A Cultivated Friendship, and Beston have been given readings on the Truro Playwright Collective reading series. He is a member of the board of the Open University of Wellfleet and a trustee of the Helltown Players.
Karen Vuranch has been a professional actor for over 30 years and has toured nationally and internationally with Coal Camp Memories, a storytelling drama written from oral histories. Karen also recreates historical figures including author Pearl Buck, labor organizer Mother Jones, humanitarian Clara Barton, Irish pirate Grace O’Malley, chef Julia Child, adventurer Gertrude Bell, pop star Cass “Mama” Elliot, pilot Jackie Cochran, and movie star Mae West as well as Edith Wharton. Karen has produced a DVD of Coal Camp Memories and two storytelling CDs. Karen taught Theatre at Concord University in West Virginia for the past 20 years until recently retiring.
John Dennis Anderson as Louis Bromfield and Karen Vuranch as Edith Wharton.
Why See It?
Bromfield, who later established Malabar Farm in Ohio, reflected that the bond he shared with Wharton was “less that of writing than of gardening.” In a time of polarized views, A Cultivated Friendship reminds us that shared passions—whether for words, travel, or gardens—can transcend difference and foster connection.
Helltown Players Connection
Helltown Players is proud to support Trustee John Dennis Anderson in presenting this evocative new work, co-created with Karen Vuranch. Through A Cultivated Friendship, they invite audiences to witness how two towering figures of American letters found kinship in the soil, and in each other.
