Jon Tenney plays a liberal California senatorial candidate who discovers all politics are personal when he returns to his Connecticut home in the world premiere of David Marshall Grant's Current Events, beginning previews May 23 at Manhattan Theatre Club.
David Petrarca directs the new play by the actor-turned-author of Snakebit, which had a respectable Off-Broadway run in 1999. The company Tenney keeps includes Barbara Barrie, Christine Ebersole, John Gallagher Jr., Jeremy Hollingworth and Seth Kirschner.
Official opening on MTC's Stage II is June 13. Current Events had a workshop at New York Stage and Film in summer 1999 at Vassar.
Designers are Derek McLane (set), Jane Greenwood (costume), Brian MacDevitt (lighting) and Bruce Ellman (sound). Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown provides original music.
Veteran Barrie is known for her Broadway performances in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Company and more. She was a regular on the TV series, "Suddenly Susan." Ebersole, a "Saturday Night Live" veteran, recently played the title role of Mame at Paper Mill Playhouse. She was Ado Annie in the 1979 Richard Rodgers-supervised Oklahoma!
Tenney last appeared at MTC in John Patrick Shanley's Beggars in the House of Plenty. On Broadway, he appeared in The Heiress, Sweet Sue, Biloxi Blues. Off-Broadway, he was seen in Impossible Marriage, The Substance of Fire and A Shayna Maidel.
Playwright Grant was seen on Broadway in Angels in America. Director Petrarca staged David Lindsay-Abaire's Fuddy Meers for MTC earlier this season.
Grant's first play, Snakebit, about neurotic artistic types colliding with each other and their pasts, moved from New York City's Grove Street Playhouse (a nonprofit 1998 production by Naked Angels) to a commercial run at the Century Theatre in 1999. It played March to August 1999. It had an earlier production in Chicago.
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MTC, operating in two spaces in City Center in Manhattan, is the resident company that introduced New York audiences to Love! Valour! Compassion!, Sight Unseen, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and more. David Auburn's Proof has its official opening May 23 on MTC's Stage I.
MTC is at 131 W. 55th Street. For $40 ticket information, call (212) 399 3030 or try the MTC web site at http://www.mtc.org.
-- By Kenneth Jones
