Exclusive: Rob Ashford Would Be ‘Thrilled’ for TRU to Return to NYC, Says Jesse Tyler Ferguson Has ‘Gotten Better’

Jesse Tyler Ferguson is starring as Truman Capote in Jay Presson Allen’s play Tru through November 14 — but director Rob Ashford isn’t ruling out a return to New York City. 

“It’s going well in London,” Ashford exclusively tells BroadwayWorld of the show’s run at the Menier Chocolate Factory following its Off-Broadway debut at House of the Redeemer and one-night-only benefit staged reading in Tangier, Morocco. “They’re loving it.” 

“It’d be great to have it come back,” Ashford adds. “We’d be thrilled.”

Because Tru came to life at House of the Redeemer — a historic Upper East Side mansion first owned by a great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt — Ashford and Ferguson only agreed to do it in London on one condition.  

“Jesse and I both said, ‘Well, if you can turn [the Menier Chocolate Factory] into Truman’s apartment and not make it feel like a theater, then yeah, we’ll do it,’” Ashford recalls. “And they made it a room. They paneled it all. You enter in a foyer.” 

“You’d never know you were in a theater, and the audience really enjoys that moment,” Ashford continues. “They come early, and they wander around, and they look at the stuff on his desk, and they see the photographs, and everything is authentic and true to Tru — and true to that time period.” 

Ashford explains that Ferguson — who portrays novelist and screenwriter Capote at his breaking point inside his New York apartment — wrote out “all of the note cards and all the cards [in] the Rolodex and everything on his desk.” 

“So if you would go through his drawers, you’d see all of this correspondence,” adds Ashford, explaining that Ferguson is “that kind of an actor” who really goes all out. 

“He’s gotten better,” Ashford says of Ferguson. “I mean, every time it’s better because he just goes deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper into this man. He’s just fantastic.” 

Drawn entirely from Capote’s own words, Tru was originally staged in 1989. 

Ferguson previously told Town & Country that he loved working on that initial reading of Tru in Morocco so much that he wanted to revisit the material as soon as possible. 

“It ended up going really well in Tangier,” Ferguson said. “I told Rob after we were done, ‘I think that this would be something I’d like to continue working on.’ I felt like I needed to put this out in the world as soon as possible, and to see what it felt like to do it.”  

“[Capote] was a truth teller and he exposed people, yet somehow, he did it glamorously and also, he curated the way he did it,” Ferguson said. “He didn’t find everyone worthy of his pen, which I think is also really interesting. The people who he went after, he went after for a reason — because he found them interesting.”