Invisible Theatre News

CAPOTE REVEALED IN "TRU" By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com Chuck Yates is Truman Capote in "Tru." I always remember Truman Capote as the flamingly outrageous, perennial TV guest you watched in the 1960s because he was liable to say most anything – the more shocking the better. Parents hated him, which was always a good thing. But that's not the Capote personality we get to see in “Tru” at Invisible Theatre, where visiting guest artist Chuck Yates creates an off-camera Capote desperately alone in his sumptuous apartment at Manhattan's UN Plaza overlooking the East River. Truman unplugged, you might say. Directed by Yates' good friend Larry Raben, the actor in this one-man show creates a mincing Capote on the edge of losing it. Facing the collapse of his career, he refuses to face anything. Always changing his focus, nervously looking some place else for help, he's desperate to get a laugh, grab for a straight line he can turn i...

September 03, 2015 10:45 am   •   Kathleen Allen Arizona Daily Star Truman Capote was brilliant. Funny. Acerbic. Mean spirited. Completely self-destructive. And Chuck Yates brings the late author of “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to chilling life in Invisible Theatre’s production of the Jay Presson Allen play “Tru,” which opened Wednesday. Yates is recreating the role he first played for the Palm Springs, Calif. theater he co-founded, Coyote StageWorks. He shimmied into the skin of the man who was short, chubby, an alcoholic and, at the time the play is set, Christmas, 1975, abandoned by most of his high-brow friends thanks to a tell-all chapter of his unpublished book “Answered Prayers” published in Esquire magazine. Yates has incorporated Capote’s fluttery hands, eccentric mannerisms, and given us a reasonable facsimile of that distinctive, high-pitched voice. It’s not hard to believe we are watching the real Capote as he paces back and f...