The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman is “a onewoman show about the greatest American actress of the nineteenth century” (Carolyn Gage). Cushman was a larger-than-life, charismatic, commanding figure, famed for her “breeches” roles, who was not shy about her sexuality, her life, or her death. Confronted with her own mortality as she battled breast cancer, Gage’s Cushman offers insights into her relationships and her work, quoting some of her most memorable roles, in a work that is “Electrifying…enormously entertaining, absorbing, and brutally honest” (The Sunday Mail, Adelaide, Australia).
Cast
Charlotte: Rebecca Howard
Posters and Programs
Lost in Yonkers
Written by America’s great comic playwright, Neil Simon, this memory play is set in Yonkers in 1942. Bella is thirty-five years old, mentally challenged, and living at home with her mother, stern Grandma Kurnitz. As the play opens, ne’er-do-well son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady’s doorstep. He is financially strapped and taking to the road as a salesman. The boys are left to contend with Grandma, with Bella and her secret romance, and with Louie, her brother, a small-time hoodlum in a strange new world called Yonkers.
Cast
Louie: Matt Benzing
Grandma Kurnitz: Nora Ellen Bowers
Eddie: Jeff Douglass
Arty: Trevor Fisher
Jay: Caylor Jarvis
Gert: Cathy McVey
Bella: Anne Settevendemie Ritz
Always a Bridesmaid
In this hilarious comedic romp, four friends have sworn to keep the promise they made on the night of their Senior Prom: to be in each other’s weddings…no matter what. More than thirty years later, these Southern friends-for-life are still making “the long walk” for each other, determined to honor that vow.
Cast
Libby: Trisha Cooper
Sedalia: Cate Hudson
Charlie: Annie Morris
Deedra: Dawna Peterson
Monette: Deb Richardson
Retreat from Moscow
A 2004 Tony nominee for Best Play, this play is about the end of a three-decade marriage and the subsequent emotional fallout. Edward and Alice have been married for 33 years. He is a teacher at a boys’ school, perfectly at home with his daily crossword and lately engrossed in reading about Napoleon’s costly invasion of Moscow. She is an observant Catholic, exacting and opinionated, and has been collecting poems about lost love for a new anthology. Jamie, their diffident thirty-two year old son, is visiting for the weekend when Edward announces he has met another woman. Retreat is about love, hatred, betrayal, sacrifice and the role that each can play in a decades-long marriage once the near-inevitable ennui sets in.
God of Carnage
Described as “savagely funny” by the International Herald Tribune, this comedy follows two sets of parents who meet after a playground fight between their sons to discuss the incident in a rational manner. As the evening goes on, the parents become increasingly childish, resulting in a chaotic clash of egos and accusations.
Tuesdays with Morrie
The autobiography of Albom, an accomplished journalist driven solely by his career, and Morrie Schwartz, his former college professor. Sixteen years after graduation, Mitch happens to catch Morrie’s appearance on a television news program and learn that his old professor is battling Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Mitch is reunited with Morrie, and what starts as a simpl visit turns into a weekly pilgrimage and a last class in the meaning of life
Seussical
Now one of the most performed shows in America, Suessical is based on Dr. Suess’s most beloved characters, including Horton the Elephant, The Cat in the Hat, Gertrude McFuzz, lazy Mayzie, and a little boy with a big imagination–Jojo.
The colorful characters transport us from the Jungle of Nool to the Circus McGurkus to the invisible world of the Whos. The musical comedy filled with “sweetness, humor and energetic high spirits!” (The New York
Times).
The Belle of Amherst
The Belle of Amherst is a one-woman play by William Luce. Based on the life of poet Emily Dickinson from 1830 to 1886, and set in her Amherst, Massachusetts home, the 1976 play makes use of her work, diaries, and letters to recollect her encounters with the significant people in her life – family, close friends, and acquaintances. It balances the agony of her seclusion with the brief bright moments when she was able to experience some joy.
Cast
Emily: Claire Squance
Walter Cronkite is Dead
A fierce thunderstorm has shut down airports up and down the East Coast. Two women, who appear to have nothing in common, are stuck in a waiting area at Reagan National Airport. Patty is a chatty southerner—a blue-collar woman from a red state—who is almost physically unable to tolerate silence. Margaret is a Washingtonian, reserved, educated, liberal and not interested in sharing her thoughts, or her table, with Patty. Forced together for a long night in a public place, the two strangers have no choice but to share a bottle of wine and begin to talk…and to listen. Their conversation is funny, difficult, deeply revealing and astonishingly frank. Patty and Margaret share details of their lives that lead them to a place of kinship neither of them could have imagined. Yes, Walter Cronkite is dead, but his wisdom and compassion lives on in this insightful comedy about what might be possible if people from opposite sides of the political aisle would stop shouting and take even one night to listen.
The Great American Trailer Park Musical
Liz Smith, of the NY Post, describes this as: “A delicious new musical. The joint is jammed and jumping with raucous laughter. It’s like ‘The Honeymooners’ meets ‘The Best Little Whorehouse’ in
‘Urinetown.’” This delectable morsel of modern America explores the relationships between the tenants of the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park in Florida. You’ll meet Pippi, “the stripper on the run;” the Dr. Phil-loving, agoraphobic Jeannie; Jeannie’s tollbooth collector husband, Norbert; anger-management-challenged Duke; and Betty, Lin, and Pickles, the wise (and wisecracking) chorus. Musical numbers include gems such as “This Side of the Track,” “Flushed Down the Pipes,” and “Road Kill.”
Out Cry! by Tennessee Williams
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