The LAByrinth Theater Company's premiere of John Patrick Shanley's caustic comedy Where's My Money? will wrap up its extended run on July 29. The play, directed by the author and starring John Ortiz, was to have originally closed on July 21.
Ortiz began last season by starring in LAByrinth Theatre Company's summer 2000 production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' Jesus Hopped the "A" Train. He went on to repeat his portrayal of a prison inmate in a 2001 remounting of the production (for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination) and star with Rosie Perez in References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot at the Public Theater (to say nothing of his new television series, "The Job").
Where's My Money? began previews at the Center Stage space Off Broadway June 19. David Deblinger, Yetta Gottesman, Florencia Lozano, Chris McGarry and Paula Pizzi are also in the cast.
Ortiz and Deblinger star as two self-assured divorce attorneys possessed of rather aggressive and skewed attitudes toward their own marriages. Both were cuckolded by their first wives and are a little guarded, to say the least, concerning their current spouses. Ortiz's wife, meanwhile, has her own problems, namely the ghost of an old boyfriend. He reappears to demand repayment of the money she once borrowed from him to buy the wedding dress she used to marry her hubby. Another ghost haunts Deblinger, who happens to be pouring through "Crime and Punishment." Knives, guns and joint checking accounts all play their part in a production that makes good use of the actors' lungs.
Shanley's was represented on the Off-Broadway stage just this past winter, directing his own play, Cellini, at Second Stage. His other plays include Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Four Dogs and a Bone. LAByrinth recently wrapped up a run of Erin Cressida Wilson's The Trail of Her Inner Thigh. As chance would have it, it was directed by John Gould Rubin, who acted in Cellini.
Tickets are $15. Center Stage is located at 48 W. 21st St. In Manhattan. For more information, call (212) 905-0593.
—By Robert Simonson
