Actor to give free reading of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

Actor Marco Barricelli of the American Conservatory Theater will give a free reading from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 28, in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The event, organized by Stanford University's Discovering Dickens 2004 Community Reading Project, is open to the public. Refreshments will be served at intermission.

Barricelli gave two public readings from Great Expectations to overflow crowds last year as part of the 2003 Discovering Dickens project.

This year, more than 6,000 people have participated in Stanford's unique reading project, which will conclude with a discussion of A Tale of Two Cities and a reception at Stanford's Community Day on Sunday, April 4. That event, which is also free and open to the public, will take place in the Frances C. Arrillaga Center from 1 to 2:30 p.m.

Beginning in January, readers around the country were given the opportunity to experience, free of charge, A Tale of Two Cities as Victorian readers would have ­ in weekly installments intended to be read aloud in gatherings of family and friends. The installments also have been posted weekly on the Stanford website at http://dickens.stanford.edu. That site features facts about Dickens and the era in which he wrote.

Set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities is the Victorian author's famous novel of love, revolution, heroic sacrifice and eerie resemblances. Famously beginning, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Dickens' only historical novel is both a personal and political look at the French Revolution. Critics have suggested that the novel reflects both the concerns of Dickens' own time and the difficulties in his personal life. He investigates the troubling intersection of the personal and the political, the human and the historical.

Barricelli, a graduate of the Juilliard School, spent seven seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. At the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, his credits include Buried Child, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, The Beard of Avon, Celebration, The Room, Enrico IV, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Invention of Love, Long Day's Journey into Night, Hecuba, Mary Stuart, Insurrection: Holding History, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo.

The Discovering Dickens project is sponsored by Continuing Studies in conjunction with the Office of the President, the Stanford Alumni Association, University Communications, University Libraries, Stanford Community Day and the Palo Alto Weekly. For more information, call (650) 724-9588.