 Press Room:
Dearly Beloved
About the authors of
Dearly Beloved
tickets on sale now
 When
Dearly Beloved received its world premiere on November 11, 2005, at
the Asheville Community Theatre in Asheville, N.C., its three co-authors
must have reflected on the truly unique journey that brought them to that
momentous occasion in their careers – one almost worthy of a TV sitcom.
Picture it … three Los Angeles showbiz veterans grow
weary of the Hollywood grind and decide to move to the mountains of North
Carolina and write plays together. Of course, they’ll need someplace to
live. So they’re looking for houses. Their real estate agent is a local
community theater actress. And, by some strange twist of fate, years ago
she was in a show written by one of them.
But wait, there’s more! … The writers have a new play.
The actress takes it to her theater. Everyone who reads it howls, so the
theater adds the play to its next season. And lo and behold, Dearly
Beloved ends up premiering in Asheville, now home to three new arrivals:
Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, and Jamie Wooten.
Jessie Jones co-authored the play Dearly
Departed, as well as its screen adaptation, Kingdom Come, which
was released by Fox Searchlight Films in 2002. She has had several short
stories published and has written for television sitcoms and an animated
series for Walt Disney Productions. Jessie was also a character actor for
many years, performing in New York and numerous regional theaters, as well
as in TV (Murphy Brown, Designing Women, and Night Court)
and film.
Nicholas Hope won the Texas New Playwrights
Festival for his first play, A Friend of the Family. He has written
for the TV series For Your Love and Teacher’s Pet. For many
years, he was also director of casting for Theatre Communications Group in
New York and ABC Television in Los Angeles.
Jamie Wooten has written and produced nearly 400
episodes of network television, including four seasons on the classic series
The Golden Girls, as well as on the sitcoms For Your Love and
Half & Half. He was a recipient of the Writers Guild of America
Award for The Earth Day Special. Jamie is also an award-winning BMI
songwriter.
“We are all Southerners,” Jones says. (Both she and
Hope are Texans, Wooten is from Fremont, N.C.) “We write about Southern
characters. We know what they eat for breakfast.”
Dearly Beloved, the first of a trilogy of plays
by the threesome, pokes fun at a Southern wedding gone amok, but they’re
careful not to make the characters into clichéd hillbillies, Jones says.
“This is something that each of us has run into,” she says. “In New York, I
was treated as the family pet because I was Southern. This is not Li’l
Abner. We cherish these people.”
Christmas Belles, the sequel to Dearly
Beloved, premiered last November at the Asheville Community Theatre.
And the final chapter of the trilogy, Southern Hospitality, is
scheduled to debut later this year.
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