About the Play:

Full Gallop is a full-length comedic drama by Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson. A play based on the life of the legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who stood at the centre of American style for five decades. As editor of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue magazines, and as a member of the International Cafe Society, she chronicled the extraordinary people and events of her time. Full Gallop is a portrait of this remarkable woman at a turning point in her life.

Full Gallop is about fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland, the high-priestess of high-fashion who dictated and defined style by editing first Harper's Bazaar and then Vogue. Set in 1971 in Vreeland's well-appointed Park Avenue apartment, the one-woman show wears the views and vanities of a woman who was capricious as Auntie Mame, as calculating as Cleopatra. Now widowed, the self-made Vreeland has just returned home to New York after four months in Europe – a trip she took after her very public firing as editor of Vogue magazine. Along with trying to coordinate an increasingly problematic dinner she's planned, Vreeland is scrambling to secure a new position, as much to confound her detractors as to shore up her finances. She has hopes that a wealthy friend who is invited will bankroll her in starting a magazine of her own. Other friends, however, attempt to persuade her to take a job at the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her distinctive style, once she decides in which direction her life will move, she goes at it "full gallop." Full Gallop is a collaboration between actress Mary Louise Wilson and playwright Mark Hampton and was obviously created for Wilson.

Full Gallop was first produced as a work in progress at the Bay Street Theatre Festival in Sag Harbor, New York in 1993 with Mary Louise Wilson as Diana Vreeland. She continued with the role in its world premiere in 1995 at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, in two New York City engagements, in 1995 at Manhattan Theatre Club and in 1996 at the Westside Theatre. The veteran character actor of featured roles in countless Broadway and off-Broadway musicals and plays, Mary Louise Wilson became a star at age sixty, winning an Obie and a Drama Desk award for her performance. The play has since been produced at regional and community theatres across the US as well as in London, Australia, South Africa, South America, France, Italy and Uruguay.

Cast: 1 female

What people say:

"…glitteringly played and envisaged by Wilson, Vreeland and her life become an absorbing – nay, enthralling – theatrical episode." — New York Post

"Full Gallop is, as Vreeland herself might have said, divine, divine, divine." — New York Daily News

"In a witticism worthy of Oscar Wilde, fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland, whose existence centered on imaginative clothes-and more importantly, the lives people led in them-once declared, 'Exaggeration is the only reality.' That sense of exaggeration, carried off by a larger-than-life character credited with defining fashion for much of the 20th century, infuses Full Gallop." — Backstage

About the Playwright:

Mark Hampton is an American playwright and dramatist. As an actor-writer-musician he has performed in New York clubs, Chicago's Second City, and on Saturday Night Live.

Mary Louise Wilson is an award-winning American stage, film and television actress. She has acted on and off Broadway and in films and TV for nearly fifty years. Roles include Vera Joseph in 4000 Miles at Lincoln Center (Obie Award), Big Edie in Grey Gardens (Tony Award), Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret (Tony nomination), and Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop (Drama Desk Award). Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker and The New York Times and she teaches acting at Tulane University. She lives in upstate New York.