NewsCorthron's A Cool Dip Will Get World Premiere at Playwrights; More Season Casting AnnouncedThe Playwrights Horizons 2009-10 season will include the world premiere of Kia Corthron's A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, the Off-Broadway not-for-profit announced June 4.
By
Kenneth Jones
June 04, 2009
Playwright Kia Corthron
Additional casting for the season was also revealed.
Chay Yew will direct A Cool Dip, from the author of Breath, Boom and Force Continuum, to play the intimate Peter Jay Sharp Theater in spring 2010. The staging will be a co-production with The Play Company (Kate Loewald, founding producer) and Culture Project (Allan Buchman, artistic director). The title was the last to be announced; the season is now complete.
Here's how PH characterizes the play: "When an African preacher-in-training is taken in by a family in the American South, he finds his calling in the broken lives around him. The town's water supply is depleted by drought, a young orphan is starved for guidance, and a mother and daughter are haunted by tragedy, but the relentlessly upbeat preacher determines to battle —however he can — the personal and political forces that threaten the ecology of his new home."
The 2009-10 Playwrights Horizons season begins Aug. 21 with the first preview of Daniel Goldfarb's The Retributionists in the PH Mainstage Theater on West 42nd Street. Specific production dates have not been announced for the season.
The additional season casting for two productions includes:
Obie Award winner Eisa Davis (Passing Strange), Glenn Fitzgerald (Lortel Award nominee for Lobby Hero at Playwrights Horizons, Brian Darling on ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money") and Louis Cancelmi (The Singing Forest, Blasted) will join Parker Posey (Lortel Award for Hurlyburly and Lortel nomination for Fifth of July, plus films "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show") in This, the world premiere of a new play by Obie Award winner Melissa James Gibson (Suitcase, [sic]), directed by Obie Award winner Daniel Aukin ([sic], eight seasons as artistic director of SoHo Rep).
Obie Award winner Reed Birney (last season's The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons, Blasted, "Gossip Girl"), Tony Award nominee Peter Friedman (Ragtime, Playwrights Horizons' The Heidi Chronicles, 2009 Drama Desk nomination for Body Awareness) and Obie Award winner Deirdre O'Connell (Manic Flight Reaction at Playwrights Horizons, Drama Desk nomination for Love and Anger) join the cast of Circle Mirror Transformation, the world premiere of a new play by Annie Baker (Body Awareness at Atlantic Theater Company), directed by Sam Gold (Rag and Bone at Rattlestick, The Black Eyed at New York Theatre Workshop). For subscription and ticket information, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200, noon to 8 PM daily, or purchase online at the Playwrights Horizons website at www.playwrightshorizons.org.
The production will include Bernstein’s incidental music for Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of The Lark, and Menotti’s The Unicorn, The Gorgon, and The Manticore.
Based on the novel and film by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the new musical will reunite Guettel with Tony-winning Light in the Piazza director Bartlett Sher.
