Each year members of the English department faculty move from behind their lecterns and into the limelight for a staged reading of a play.

This year that tradition will continue with the presentation of Joe Orton's "Fred and Madge" at 5:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 8, in the lecture hall of the Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St. The reading, which will conclude about 7 p.m., is free and open to the public.

"Fred and Madge" is Orton's first full-length play. He wrote it in his mid-20s and first published it only two years ago.

"All the signs of Orton are there: the satire against British sacred cows -- royalty (and its horses), Church of England, Conservative party, Indian empire, the BBC," says Murray Biggs, adjunct professor of English and theater studies, who will direct the play. "But even the playwright doesn't take his own satire too seriously. What lingers, as always with Orton, is the sheer energy of invention, the verbal nonsense that allies the play with the absurdists, even the surrealists."

The cast will feature Professors Marie Borroff, David Bromwich, Mary Floyd-Wilson, George Hunter, Lawrence Manley, Fred Robinson and Ruth Yeazell, chair of the English department. They will be joined by Isaac Cates and Rachel Trousdale, two graduate students in English, and by Adam O'Byrne and Vanessa Wolf, two Yale College seniors.

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