Tony Award winner Lena Hall and Oscar winner Marisa Tomei, will topline How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, the new play by Sarah Ruhl, previously announced to begin performances February 23 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York.
Directed by Rebecca Taichman, the newly-announced cast also features Brian Hutchison, David McElwee, Naian González Norvind, Omar Metwally, Austin Smith, and Robin Weigert.
Opening night is scheduled for March 20.
According to press notes, the play is set at a dinner party “in the wilds of New Jersey” where “two married couples (Tomei & Metwally, and Weigert & Hutchison) discuss a younger acquaintance—a polyamorous woman (Hall) who also hunts her own meat. Fascinated, they invite this mysterious woman and her two live-in boyfriends to a New Year’s Eve party, which alters the course of their lives. How to Transcend a Happy Marriage asks: how much love can a twosome contain? What are the limits of friendship, and what happens when parents who have forgotten their own wildness have a wild rumpus all their own?”
Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist); and The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), plus The Oldest Boy, Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Eurydice; For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday; Stage Kiss; Dear Elizabeth; Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American Award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Melancholy Play; and Orlando.
Hall won her Tony Award for playing Yitzhak in the Tony-winning revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She previously appeared in Kinky Boots, Tarzan, and other Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Tomei won the Oscar for her performance in My Cousin Vinny, and was nominated for another Oscar for The Wrestler.
How to Transcend a Happy Marriage will have sets by David Zinn, costumes by Susan Hilferty, lighting by Peter Kaczorowski, sound by Matt Hubbs, and original music by Todd Almond.
Tickets, priced at $77 and $87, will be available beginning January 29 at the Lincoln Center Theater box office, Telecharge.com, and lct.org. A limited number of tickets priced at $32 are available at every performance through LincTix, LCT’s program for 21 to 35 year olds. For information and to enroll, visit LincTix.org.
