Production History
ACCOMPLICE
by Rupert Holmes
directed by Neill Hartley
March – April 2015
Accomplice: where nothing is quite what it seems. A devilishly-clever thriller that takes the audience on a thrill ride of plot twists and turns guaranteed to keep you guessing until the end. Winner of an Edgar for Best Play, Accomplice springs from the mind of Rupert Holmes, the writer behind the Tony-winning mystery The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Landscape Of The Body
By JOHN GUARE
Directed By Neill Hartley
March 07 – March 31, 2013
Landscape of the Body is a witty and gritty thriller by John Guare, the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. A childlike woman comes to New York and searches for her own identity amidst a landscape of destruction and loss. Part comedy, part mystery, and part vaudevillian musical, Landscape of the Body is a vibrant and unsettling portrait of the untold American experience. It will keep you on the edge of your seat!
Landscape of the Body – Director’s Notes
Part comedy, part mystery, and part vaudeville musical, John Guare’s Landscape of the Body is a vibrant and unsettling portrait of one woman’s search for life. Through a collage of ideas, images and historically based incidents, Guare creates plays that reveal a great deal about the human experience. In Landscape of the Body every character is searching for something that will make their lives more fulfilling. The central character Betty bears the appropriate last name of Yearn. As in his more-well known plays, The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, Guare ruminates on our celebrity-obsessed culture, but in Landscape of the Body, that quest for another life is even more personal. The loneliness of modern society and the regrets of life are interwoven with fantasy and a harsh reality. Yet, there is humor and love throughout.
Many critics have complained that the plays of John Guare lack logic. Perhaps with plays of this nature, the best advice is to allow them to wash over you, and that experience will yield it’s own logic.
Landscape Of The Body was first produced at the Academy Festival Theatre, in Lake Forest, Illinois, in July 1977. Later the show presented by Joe Papp at the Public Theatre in New York City, on October 12, 1977.
House of Blue Leaves
By JOHN GUARE
Directed By Neill Hartley
March 1st – March 25th, 2012
The House of Blue Leaves is a zany comedy centered on the day the Pope made his visit to New York City in 1965. The play’s author, John Guare, uses his characters to accentuate the elusive search for fame, and also begs the question: What is normal?
Every wonderfully wacky character, from Artie to Bunny, to Bananas to Ronnie, to Billy to Corinna, and to a group of crazy nuns, are all searching for that ambiguous something that fame represents. They make us question: Which of these characters are really normal? And the question continues to linger at the end of the play.
But, what is normal? In today’s world of reality television, creating fame out of normal people makes The House of Blue Leaves more relevant now than ever before!
Amy’s View By David Hare
Directed By Neill Hartley
March 3rd – March 27, 2011
It is 1979. Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend, Dominic, sets in train a series of events which only find their shape sixteen years later.
Broken Glass
Directed By Neill Hartley
March 11 – April 4, 2010
The show is Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass. It is November 1938, Brooklyn, New York. Sylvia Gellberg has suddenly mysteriously become paralyzed from the waist down. This happens right after she reads reports in the newspaper on Krystallnacht and an accompanying photograph of two old men forced to clean the streets of Germany with toothbrushes. She feels something should be done to stop the Nazis while most Americans believe the Germans won’t allow them to get out of hand. The atrocities in Germany and her husband’s denial of his Jewishness and her own realization that she threw her life away have overcome her. Arthur Miller peels away at the layers of the characters’ lives in this exploration of what it means to be Jewish and American in 1938.
Prisoner of 2nd Avenue
March 2009
The Prisoner of Second Avenue is an American comedy which premiered in November of 1971 starring Peter Falk and Lee Grant as Mel and Edna and Vincent Gardenia played Harry, Mel’s brother. The play was nominated for a Tony Award for best play .
The story evolves around the escalating problems of a middle aged couple living on Second Avenue on the Upper East Side of New York City. The world that has been so hard on the Edison’s is not much different from the upward striving executives and their families of today.
Madagascar by J.T. Rogers
March 2008
How a mysterious disappearance changes three lives forever.
Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron
March 2007
A comedy exploring the bitter feud between larger-than-life 20th-century literary figures Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
Lettice and Lovage by Peter Shaffer
March 2006
History, drama and a 16th-century cordial spark an unlikely friendship between two very different but equally eccentric Englishwomen.
Vita & Virginia by Eileen Atkins
October/November 2004
An adaptation of the passionate correspondence between writers Virginia Woolf and
Vita Sackville-West.
Voices by Susan Griffin
December 2003
The joys, sorrows, loves and lives of five unforgettable women.