Playwrights Horizons 2007/2008 Season Announced!

Playwrights Horizons, under the leadership of Artistic Director Tim Sanford and Managing Director Leslie Marcus, has announced new details for three productions of its 2007/2008 Season, including the first casting news:



4-time Academy Award nominee, 2-time Golden Globe winner and stage veteran Marsha Mason (Oscar nominations for The Goodbye Girl, Cinderella Liberty, Only When I Laugh and Chapter Two; on Broadway in The Good Doctor, Roundabout’s Night of the Iguana and the recent Steel Magnolias) will star in the World Premiere of A FEMININE ENDING, a new play by Sarah Treem (Mirror, Mirror; Empty Sky). Directed by Tony Award winner Blair Brown (as an actor – James Joyce’s The Dead which premiered at Playwrights Horizons, Copenhagen), it will begin performances in October 2007.



Tony Award nominee Celia Keenan-Bolger (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, also originated the role of Eponine in the revival of Les Misérables) will star in the World Premiere of SAVED, a new musical with music & lyrics by Michael Friedman (the Civilians, Romeo & Juliet for Shakespeare in the Park this summer) and book & lyrics by 2-time Olivier Award nominee John Dempsey (The Witches of Eastwick) & Obie Award winner Rinne Groff (The Ruby Sunrise, “Weeds”), based on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture written by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban. Directed by Gary Griffin (The Color Purple), it will begin performances in Spring 2008.



2-time Obie Award winner Anne Bogart (Artistic Director of SITI Company) will direct the New York premiere of DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE, a new play by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House). Performances will begin in Winter/Spring 2008.



Additional casting for the season will be announced in the coming months.



In addition to A FEMININE ENDING, SAVED and DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE, the 2007-2008 Season will also include the following three previously-announced productions:



the World Premiere of 100 SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW, a new play by Kate Fodor (Hannah and Martin), directed by Ethan McSweeny (Broadway revival of The Best Man, Never the Sinner). With previews beginning August 24, 2007, 100 SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW will be the first production of the season.

the World Premiere of DORIS TO DARLENE: A CAUTIONARY VALENTINE, a new play by Jordan Harrison (Act a Lady, Finn in the Underworld), directed by Obie Award winner Les Waters (Big Love at BAM, Hot ‘N’ Throbbing at Signature, Apparition at The Connelly)


the New York City Premiere of THE DRUNKEN CITY, a new play by Adam Bock (Swimming in the Shallows, The Thugs), directed by Trip Cullman (Swimming in the Shallows, Some Men, The Last Sunday in June, Manic Flight Reaction at Playwrights Horizons)


Subscriptions to Playwrights Horizons’ 2007/2008 season are available in 6-show (four Mainstage productions and two productions in The Peter Jay Sharp Theater) or 4-show (four Mainstage productions) packages. Packages include “Anytime” (6-show $260, 4-show $195), “Matinees” (6-show $240, 4-show $175), “Previews and Sunday Nights” (6-show $225, 4-show $160), “FlexPass” (6 tickets $270, 4 tickets $200), “30&Under FlexPass” (6 tickets $120, 4 tickets $80) and “Student FlexPass” (6 tickets, $60, 4 tickets $40). In addition to discounts on all Mainstage season attractions, subscribers receive priority seating, ticket exchange privileges, parking and dining discounts, and exclusive mailings of Playwrights Horizons Bulletins.



PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS, under the leadership of Artistic Director Tim Sanford and Managing Director Leslie Marcus, is a writer’s theater dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers and lyricists, and to the production of their new work. In its 37 years, Playwrights Horizons has presented the work of more than 375 writers and has received numerous awards and honors. Notable productions include four Pulitzer Prize winners: Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2004 Tony Award, Best Play), Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989 Tony Award, Best Play), Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, as well as Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie’s Grey Gardens (2006 Outer Critics Circle Award, Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical), Bruce Norris’s The Pain and the Itch, Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation (2005 Obie Award for Playwriting), Craig Lucas’s Small Tragedy (2004 Obie Award, Best American Play), Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, Kirsten Childs’s The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey’s James Joyce’s The Dead, William Finn’s March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, Christopher Durang’s Betty’s Summer Vacation and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, Richard Nelson’s Goodnight Children Everywhere and Franny’s Way, Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance of Fire, Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room, A.R. Gurney’s Later Life, Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s Floyd Collins and Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s Violet.



Playwrights Horizons is supported in part by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York City Council, the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate. In addition, Playwrights Horizons receives major support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, and Time Warner Inc.




PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS’ 2007/2008 SEASON




100 SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

World Premiere of a new play by Kate Fodor
Directed by Ethan McSweeny



Previews begin August 24, 2007; Opening night September 18, 2007

Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater (416 West 42nd Street)



Theresa cleans the rectory of the local parish to support her unruly teenage daughter. When its priest is forced to leave the church under uncertain circumstances and return home to his protective mother, Theresa finds herself compelled to pursue him. One eventful night joins them all, forcing a reckoning with the broken memories and shaken faith that divides them – and the discovery of a shared, tenuous common ground.



Kate Fodor (Playwright) is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award, a Joseph Jefferson Citation, an After Dark Award, and a finalist position for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her play Hannah and Martin was produced Off-Broadway by Epic Theatre Center and had productions in cities around the U.S. and abroad. Other work has been developed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Hartford Stage and Chautauqua Theater Company. Kate currently has a screenplay under development with Killer Films and is at work on commissions from TimeLine Theatre Company and Epic Theatre Center. In 2004, she was named one of “Eight to Watch” in the theater world by The New York Times. Playwrights Horizons debut.



Ethan McSweeny (Director). Broadway: The Best Man (Tony Award nomination for Best Revival, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for Best Revival). Off-Broadway: Never the Sinner: The Leopold and Loeb Story (Outer Critics Circle Award for Off-Broadway Play, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best

Director). Regional: world premieres of Jason Grote’s 1001 (Denver Center Theater), Lee Blessing’s A Body of

Water (The Guthrie and Old Globe, San Diego Theatre Critics Awards for Outstanding Play and Director), Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade (South Coast Rep); the Peter Kellogg/David Friedman musical Chasing Nicolette (Prince Music Theatre). Associate Artistic Director, George Street Playhouse (2000-2004). Playwrights Horizons debut.




A FEMININE ENDING

World Premiere of a new play by Sarah Treem
Directed by Tony Award winner Blair Brown

Featuring 4-time Academy Award nominee Marsha Mason with additional casting to be announced



Previews in October 2007

Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street)



Having recently graduated from a major conservatory, and with a rocker boyfriend on the brink of stardom, aspiring composer Amanda Blue’s “extraordinary life” seems to be all mapped out. But when she’s called home to answer a distress call from her mother (Marsha Mason) about a marital crisis, Amanda’s grand plan starts to unravel. A FEMININE ENDING is a bittersweet new play about dreams deferred, loves lost, and learning to trust a woman’s voice in a man’s world.



Sarah Treem (Playwright). Plays include Empty Sky (South Coast Rep’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, winner of the Reva Shiner New Play Festival), Against the Wall (workshop at The Source Theatre in DC and the new play lab at Berlin’s Friends of the Italian Opera), Mirror, Mirror (developed at Playwrights Horizons) and Human Voices (Manhattan Theater Club’s upcoming Springboard’s New Play Series, also heard excerpted on NPR’s All Things Considered). She teaches playwriting at Yale School of Drama, where she is also a graduate.



Blair Brown (Director) has appeared as an actor in over fifty plays, including the Broadway productions of Copenhagen (Tony Award), James Joyce’s The Dead (which premiered at Playwrights Horizons), Cabaret, Arcadia, The Secret Rapture and The Threepenny Opera. She has directed Leslie Ayvazian’s plays Rosemary and I (Passage Theatre, NJ) and Lovely Day (The Play Company on Theatre Row). She recently directed a workshop of A Feminine Ending at Portland Center Stage. She is also well-known to audiences for her extensive TV and film work, including the title role in the series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.



Marsha Mason (Maria). Broadway: Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor; Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June; The Night of the Iguana (Roundabout); Steel Magnolias. Off-Broadway: Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx, The Vagina Monologues, Love Letters, Harold Pinter’s Old Times (Roundabout), King Richard III (Lincoln Center), The Big Love (solo performance, NYTW), Lake No Bottom (Second Stage), Escape from Happiness (Naked Angels). Film: four Academy Award nominations for The Goodbye Girl (Golden Globe Award), Cinderella Liberty (Golden Globe Award), Only When I Laugh, Chapter Two. Other films include: Blume in Love, Promises in the Dark, Murder by Death, Max Dugan Returns, Heartbreak Ridge, Stella, Drop Dead Fred, Nick of Time, Two Days in the Valley, Bereft, Bride and Prejudice, The Long Shot. Extensive Television and Regional credits. Memoir: Journey “A Personal Odyssey” (2000, Simon & Schuster). She resides outside Santa Fe, NM, where she operates Resting in the River, an organically certified medicinal herb farm (www.restingintheriver.com).



DORIS TO DARLENE: A CAUTIONARY VALENTINE

World Premiere of a new play by Jordan Harrison
Directed by Obie Award winner Les Waters



Previews in November 2007

Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater (416 West 42nd Street)



In the candy-colored 1960s, a biracial schoolgirl named Doris is molded into pop star Darlene by a whiz-kid record producer who culls a top-ten hit out of Wagner’s Liebestod. Rewind to the candy-colored 1860s, where Richard Wagner is writing the melody that will become Darlene’s hit song. Fast-forward to the not-so-candy-colored present, where a teenager obsesses over Darlene’s music – and his music teacher. Three dissonant decades merge into an unlikely harmony in this time-jumping pop fairy tale about the dreams and disasters behind one transcendent song.



Jordan Harrison (Playwright). Plays include Act a Lady (2006 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Portland Center Stage), Finn in the Underworld (Berkeley Repertory Theatre), Amazons and Their Men (forthcoming at Clubbed Thumb), Kid-Simple (2004 Humana Festival, SPF Festival, American Theater Company), and The Museum Play. He is the recipient of the Heideman Award, two Jerome Fellowships and a McKnight Grant from The Playwrights’ Center, and a 2005-2006 NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Grant. Jordan has received commissions from South Coast Repertory, Guthrie Theater/Children’s Theatre Company, Cypress Films, and the Arden Theatre. A graduate of Brown University’s MFA Playwriting program, he is a resident playwright at New Dramatists. Playwrights Horizons debut.



Les Waters (Director) is currently Associate Artistic Director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre. U.S. credits include Charles L. Mee’s Big Love (BAM, 2001 Obie for Direction) and Fetes de la Nuit (Berkeley Rep); Paula Vogel’s Hot ‘N’ Throbbing (Signature), Caryl Churchill’s Fen and Ice Cream with Hot Fudge and Keith Reddin’s Rum and Coke and Romeo and Juliet (The Public); Life During Wartime (MTC); Savannah Bay (CSC); Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice (Berkeley Rep and Yale Rep); Apparition (The Connelly). UK credits include Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and David Hare’s Fanshen (The National); Sam Shepard’s Seduced and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (Royal Court). Eurydice will have its New York premiere at Second Stage in May. Playwrights Horizons debut.



DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE

New York Premiere of a new play by Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl

Directed by 2-time Obie Award winner Anne Bogart



Previews in Winter/Spring 2008

Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater (416 West 42nd Street)


Gordon is dead, but his cell phone lives on. When Jean, an empathetic museum worker, answers his ringing phone beside her in a café, she is soon playing unwitting comforter and confessor to the man’s grieving friends and family. Before she knows it, Jean’s ensnarled in the underbelly of the dead man’s bizarre life. A wildly imaginative new comedy, DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technology-obsessed world.



Sarah Ruhl (Playwright). Plays include The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2005; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Eurydice (New York premiere at Second Stage this May); Passion Play, a cycle (The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center, Helen Hayes Awards nomination for Best New Play); Melancholy Play; Orlando and Late: a cowboy song. Her plays have been produced at Lincoln Center, The Goodman, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, South Coast Rep., Yale Rep., Berkeley Rep., The Wilma Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville and internationally. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award. She recently won the MacArthur Fellowship.



Anne Bogart (Director) is the Artistic Director of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a recipient of 2 Obie Awards, a Bessie Award, a Guggenheim as well as a Rockefeller Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellow and is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Recent works with SITI include Radio Macbeth; Hotel Cassiopeia; Intimations for Saxophone;Death and the Ploughman; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; La Dispute; Score; Room; War of the Worlds; bobrauschenbergamerica; Cabin Pressure; The Radio Play; Alice’s Adventures; Culture of Desire; Bob; Going, Going, Gone; Small Lives/Big Dreams; The Medium; Hayfever; Private Lives; Miss Julie; and Orestes. She is the author of a book of essays entitled A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater and the co-author with Tina Landau of The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Soon to be released by Routledge Press a new book of essays entitled And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World.



DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons with funds provided by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust.




THE DRUNKEN CITY

New York City Premiere of a new play by Adam Bock
Directed by Trip Cullman



Previews in Spring 2008

Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street)



Off on the bar crawl to end all crawls, three twenty-something brides-to-be find their lives going topsy-turvy when one of them suddenly begins to question her future after a chance encounter with a recently jilted handsome stranger. The Drunken City is a unique theatrical take on the mystique of marriage and the ever-shifting nature of love and identity in a city that never sleeps.



Adam Bock’s (Playwright) plays include The Thugs (SoHo Repertory), Swimming in the Shallows (Second Stage), The Shaker Chair (Humana Festival), Five Flights (Rattlestick), The Typographer’s Dream (Clubbed Thumb) and The Receptionist. Bock also helped Jack Cummings III develop The Audience. He is the resident playwright at Encore Theater, a Shotgun Players Artistic Associate, and a member of New Dramatists. Adam’s plays are published by Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts Inc. and are featured in The Best Plays of 2005. Playwrights Horizons debut.



Trip Cullman (Director). New York credits include Terrence McNally’s Some Men (Second Stage), Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God (The Century Center), Sarah Schulman’s Manic Flight Reaction (Playwrights Horizons), Adam Bock’s Swimming in the Shallows (Second Stage), Jonathan Tolins’s The Last Sunday in June (Century Center and Rattlestick Theater), Paul Weitz’s Roulette (EST), Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Dark Matters (Rattlestick Theater), Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Night (The Play Company), Glen Berger’s The Wooden Breeks (MCC Theater), Brooke Berman’s Smashing (The Play Company), Rinne Groff’s Of a White Christmas (Clubbed Thumb), The Wau Wau Sisters (Ars Nova). Training: Yale School of Drama.




SAVED

World Premiere of a new musical
Music & Lyrics by Michael Friedman

Book & Lyrics by 2-time Olivier Award nominee John Dempsey & Obie Award winner Rinne Groff

Based on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture written by Brian Dannelly & Michael Urban

Directed by Gary Griffin

Featuring Tony Award nominee Celia Keenan-Bolger



Previews in Spring 2008

Playwrights Horizons’ Mainstage Theater (416 West 42nd Street)



“Are you down with G-O-D?” Good girl Mary (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and her domineering best friend Hilary Faye are starting their senior year at the top of the social food chain at American Eagle Christian High School – that is, until Mary’s boyfriend tells her he thinks he’s gay. When Jesus appears in a vision, and Mary heeds his message “to do everything she can to help him,” her good deeds are met with dire consequences, and Mary is forced to question everything she’s ever believed. Through it all, she finds faith in unexpected places and learns what it truly means to be saved.



MICHAEL FRIEDMAN (Music & Lyrics) has been the composer/lyricist for the Civilians’ [I Am] Nobody’s Lunch, Gone Missing, This is a Beautiful City and Canard, Canard, Goose?, as well as The Brand New Kid (Kennedy Center) and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. He’s also composed the score for the upcoming Shakespeare in the Park production of Romeo and Juliet. His music has also been heard in New York at NYSF/Public, NYTW, Playwrights Horizons, Roundabout, Second Stage, Soho Rep, Theater for a New Audience, Signature and The Acting Company, and regionally at The Huntington, La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, Humana Festival, ART, Williamstown Theatre Festival, London’s Soho and Gate Theatres and the Edinburgh Festival. Film work includes On Common Ground, Emile Norman: By His Own Design and Affair Game. With Steve Cosson, he co-wrote Paris Commune. He was the dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon. He is an Artistic Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, was a MacDowell fellow and is a founding Associate Artist of the Obie-Award-winning Civilians. With Rinne Groff he’s written Boy in the Bubble, a new musical, which will be presented this summer at Northwestern’s American Music Theater Project directed by Michael Greif.



JOHN DEMPSEY (Book & Lyrics) wrote book and lyrics for The Witches of Eastwick (London, Melbourne, Tokyo, Moscow), The Fix (Donmar Warehouse, directed by Sam Mendes), Zombie Prom (New York), Circles and Dick Wittington. John wrote lyrics for the musicals A Country Christmas Carol and The Reluctant Dragon as well as for the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus. His plays include One Miracle in a Lifetime and The Greater Goode. He has received two Olivier Award nominations for The Witches of Eastwick and The Fix, and is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship for Playwriting.



RINNE GROFF (Book & Lyrics). Plays include The Ruby Sunrise; Jimmy Carter was a Democrat; The Moliere Impromptu; Orange Lemon Egg Canary; What Then, Inky; Seven Supermans; and The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem, which have been produced by The Public Theater, Trinity Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Women’s Project, PS122, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin and Andy’s Summer Playhouse, among others. She has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Award, an Obie Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Award, a NYSCA Individual Artist grant and Vortex Theater Prize. Rinne is a founding member of Elevator Repair Service Theater Company, and has been a part of the writing, staging, and performing of their shows (both in the States and on European tour) since the company’s inception in 1991. She teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Dramatic Writing. Rinne was a staff writer on the second season of the Showtime series “Weeds” starring Mary Louise Parker. With Michael Friedman, she’s written Boy in the Bubble, a new musical, which will be presented this summer at Northwestern’s American Music Theater Project directed by Michael Greif.



GARY GRIFFIN (Director). Broadway: The Color Purple, The Apple Tree. Off-Broadway: The New Moon, Pardon My English, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Apple Tree for City Center Encores! Beautiful Thing. London: Pacific Overtures (Donmar Warehouse, Oliver Award Outstanding Musical Production, Olivier nomination, Best Director). Regional: My Fair Lady, A Moon for the Misbegotten (McCarter Theatre); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Signature Theatre); The Color Purple (Alliance Theatre). Chicago: A Flea in Her Ear, Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre); My Fair Lady, Gross Indecency (Court Theatre). He’s received eight Joseph Jefferson Awards for Direction and was named “Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts” by the Chicago Tribune. Upcoming projects: directing the national tour of The Color Purple and Kismet for the English National Opera.



CELIA KEENAN-BOLGER (Mary) earned a 2005 Tony Award nomination for her performance as Olive Ostrovsky in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, as well as winning Drama Desk and Theatre World awards. Also on Broadway, she originated the role of Eponine in the Broadway revival of Les Misérables, for which she recently earned a Drama Desk nomination. Off-Broadway: Michael John LaChiusa’s Little Fish (Second Stage), Kindertransport (MTC), Summer of ’42 (Variety Arts). Favorite regional credits include Joanna in Sweeney Todd (Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration), Emily in Our Town (Intiman Theatre), Clara in The Light in the Piazza (Goodman Theatre). She is a graduate of the University of Michigan Musical Theatre Department.



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