By Robert Simonson
12 Jan 2009

	Uncle Vanya's O'Hare, Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard

Theatre for a New Audience will do back-to-back productions of two of the Bard's best, Othello and Hamlet. The first, beginning Feb. 14, is a new eight-actor, two-hour long production of the classic Shakespeare drama, directed by Arin Arbus. The second, beginning March 15, will star Christian Camargo as the young Dane, and will be directed by David Esbjornson.

New works by living playwrights include Chasing Manet, a Tina Howe play about two residents of the Mount Airy Nursing Home who plot to escape to Paris aboard the QE2. The Primary Stages show, starting March 24, will bring Jane Alexander back to the stage. The productive Theresa Rebeck gives Playwrights Horizons her latest, Our House, a comedy about a reality show. Michael Mayer directs, commencing in May.

	Bartlett Sher and Craig Lucas
	photo by Aubrey Reuben

Mark Wing-Davey and Craig Lucas team up at the Public Theater for the ambitious The Singing Forest. The play, which gets underway April 7, intertwines today's world, Freud's inner circle in 1930's Vienna, and Paris at the end of World War II. Also at the Public, Christopher Durang has the funniest title of the season with his Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. Previews of the story about a paranoid woman who wonders if her husband is a terrorist, and if her father is a government agent, begin March 24.

Other attractions due in the coming months include: Lansky, a one-man show starring Mike Burstyn as a certain Jewish gangster, opening Feb. 5 at St. Luke's; playwright Donald Margulies' latest, and the longest-titled play of the season, Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis De Rougemont (As Told by Himself), opening Feb. 8 at Primary Stage; This Beautiful City, a new work about the growth of the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs by those quasi-documentarian reality-robbers The Civilians, beginning Feb. 3 at the Vineyard Theatre; That Pretty Pretty; Or, the Rape Play, the provocatively titled Sheila Callaghan play about a man having a bit of trouble with life, starting Feb. 10 at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; Zooman and The Sign, the Signature Theatre Company revival of Charles Fuller's play, and a part of the troupe's examination of the legacy of the Negro Ensemble Company; Handball, The New Group's production of Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's play about a quickly gentrifying neighborhood, opening May 14 at the Acorn; Coraline, an MCC Theatre world premiere of Stephin Merritt and David Greenspan's new musical about a lonely girl who steps through a door into a perfected replica of her own world, beginning May 6 at the Lucille Lortel; The Good Negro, Tracey Scott Wilson's play about the 1960's American Civil Rights Movement, at the Public Theater starting March 3; The Third Story, a new play by Charles Busch starring Kathleen Turner, presented by MCC at the Lucille Lortel, from Jan. 14 on; and Things of Dry Hours, Naomi Wallace's about Tife Hogan, a black Sunday school teacher and Communist Party leader, living in Depression-era Alabama, at New York Theatre Workshop.

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