Atlantic artistic director Neil Pepe (Hands on a Hardbody) directs the play by veteran playwright Guare, who has penned The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, A Free Man of Color and Two Gentlemen of Verona. 3 Kinds of Exile will run June 23.
The playwright said it was not his original intention to appear in the play in which he plays a "character" named John Guare. "One of the scenes takes place in front of a painting that a friend of mine did, and we would do readings of the play in front of the painting up in Maine," he said. "I couldn't find another actor to play one of the parts. I was going to go up anyway, so I read it. We did two readings of it, and at the end of it, I thought, 'Oh, I have to be in this.' It's as simple as that. It's something I haven't done in, oh, maybe 50 years."
Read Playbill.com's Brief Encounter with Guare here.
Guare is joined in the cast by Peter Maloney (Arcadia, Carousel), David Pittu (LoveMusik, Is He Dead?), Alison Cimmet (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Jeffrey Kuhn (The 39 Steps, Spamalot), Jacquelyn Landgraf (365 Days/365 Plays), Martin Moran (Titanic, All the Rage), Kate Rigg (BFE), Omar Sangare (Six Degrees of Separation) and Timothy Splain (A Minister's Wife).
According to the Atlantic, "With great psychological insight and arresting theatricality, John Guare presents three artists, all of whom forged complicated lives in the West, having struggled and suffered amid the cultural and political turmoil of Eastern Europe in the mid-20th Century. Drawing from the experiences of three real exiles from Czechoslovakia and Poland, Guare weaves the stories of these lives into a riveting dramatic tapestry and probes the meaning of home, identity and how we carry the past with us." The production has scenic design by Takeshi Kata, costume design by Susan Hilferty, lighting design by Donald Holder and original music and sound design by Josh Schmidt.
Pepe recently staged Hands on a Hardbody and the Broadway revivals of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and Mamet's A Life in the Theatre.
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