Alley Theatre to Produce Agatha Christie's BLACK COFFEE on the Hubbard Stage, 7/7-8/5

Beginning in July 2012, the Alley Theatre will produce Agatha Christie's BLACK COFFEE during its popular ExxonMobil Summer Chills series. Under the direction of Gregory Boyd, the Alley's resident company of actors will bring to life the cast of characters, including the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, in Agatha Christie's BLACK COFFEE.

Agatha Christie's BLACK COFFEE begins performances Friday, July 7, opens officially Sunday, July 8, and runs through Sunday, August 5 on the Hubbard Stage.

For the past 18 years, the Alley Theatre's ExxonMobil Summer Chills has been a long-running tradition featuring the resident Acting Company.

In Agatha Christie's BLACK COFFEE, Poirot absorbs clues to solve the murder of Sir Claude Amory, an inventor of a new weapons formula. The cast is filled with the suspicious characters and features a plot with twists that are the trademark of Christie. BLACK COFFEE is Christie's first play, initially produced in 1930.

Dame Agatha Christie, creator of murder mysteries, was born in 1890 and worked as a hospital dispenser during World War I. Her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, the Belgian hero who was to appear in many subsequent novels and plays. Over the next 56 years, Christie wrote 66 novels and more than a dozen plays, including Murder on the Orient Express, The Mousetrap, The Unexpected Guest, And Then There Were None, and the Miss Marple mysteries – which served as the basis for the films Murder, She Said and Murder at the Gallop and the inspiration for many television programs. The Alley has produced many of Christie's plays, among them Death on the Nile, Witness for the Prosecution, The Mousetrap, Spider's Web, Towards Zero, and Black Coffee.

TICKET INFORMATION
Tickets to Agatha Christie's Black Coffee start at $25. Tickets are currently available to subscribers and will go on sale to members of the Alley Theatre's E-mail Club April 23. Tickets will be available to the general public on April 29. All tickets to Agatha Christie's Black Coffee are available for purchase at alleytheatre.org, at the Alley Theatre Box Office, 615 Texas Avenue, or by calling 713.220.5700. Groups of 10 or more can receive special concierge services and select discounts by calling 713.220.5700 and asking for the group sales department.

ABOUT THE Alley Theatre
The Alley Theatre, one of America's leading not-for-profit theatres, is a nationally recognized performing arts company that is focused on collaborating with resident actors, visiting artists, directors, designers, dramaturgs and authors to cultivate the new voices, new work, and new artists of the American theatre. Under the direction of Artistic Director Gregory Boyd and Managing Director Dean R. Gladden, the Alley has also brought its productions to 40 American cities, and to Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg and New York's Lincoln Center, as well as to major European festivals (including two in one season at the Venice Biennale) and Broadway. As a recipient of the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, the Alley creates a wide-ranging repertoire and innovative productions of classics, neglected modern plays, and premieres, as well as new works that will become classics for the future developed through the Alley's New Play Initiative. The Alley's productions are built and rehearsed in the Alley Theatre Center for Theatre Production – a 75,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the theatres themselves and are performed on the 824-seat Hubbard Stage and the 310-seat Neuhaus Stage. The Alley continues to pave the way for Houston audiences to experience thought-provoking, diverse and transformative theatre produced and performed by its professional company year round.

Black Coffee is presented by special arrangement with SAMUEL FRENCH, INC.
BLACK COFFEE Copyright © 1930 Agatha Christie Limited, a Chorion Company. All rights reserved.