Margulies to Get Second Broadway Bow Via MTC With Brooklyn Boy; Adam Arkin Stars
By Robert Simonson
and Kenneth Jones
11 Mar 2004
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Donald Margulies
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Manhattan Theatre Club will turn to playwright Donald Margulies again next season, when it produces the writer's new play Brooklyn Boy at Broadway's Biltmore Theatre. MTC is giving Margulies' Sight Unseen its Broadway premiere this spring.
Brooklyn Boy will open on Jan. 13, 2005, the New York Times reported. The seven-character, six-scene drama, to star Adam Arkin as a novelist, is a co-production with South Coast Repertory. Daniel Sullivan will direct.
Arkin will play Eric Weiss, a novelist who has a breakthrough success in his late 40s with an
autobiographical novel called "Brooklyn Boy." The success come, however, just as his father is dying, his
marriage is dissolving, and Hollywood is calling. Arkin played Weiss in a reading in the Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Rep last
May. The reading also featured David Paymer, Mimi Lieber and Lauren Ambrose.
The Arkin clan has a prediliction for Margulies' work. Adam acted in the original Off-Broadway MTC/Orpheum Theatre production of Sight Unseen, replacing Dennis Boutsikaris in the lead role, while his brother, Matthew, starred in Dinner With Friends.
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Ben Shenkman, the Tony Award-nominated actor of Broadway's Proof, will return to that production's artistic home, Manhattan Theatre Club, to star in Sight Unseen on Broadway this spring.
Shenkman, only recently viewed a rising actor, played Hal in Proof Off-Broadway at MTC and then on Broadway (where he and the entire company were Tony nommed). He snagged the choice role of neurotic Louis in the HBO film, "Angels in America," introducing his work to millions.
Shenkman replaces Liev Schreiber in the MTC revival of Donald Margulies' Sight Unseen, about questions of identity and authenticity, personal and professional, in the 1980s art world. Schreiber had the opportunity to direct a film and bowed out of the Broadway run at the Biltmore, despite being part of MTC's 2003-04 marketing campaign for the new Broadway space, the Biltmore Theatre.
Biltmore previews for Sight Unseen begin May 6 and opening is set for May 25.
Laura Linney, who appeared in the original 1992 New York run of the play, produced Off-Broadway by MTC, returns to the work, but in a different role.
This is the Broadway debut of the drama by the playwright who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends.
Shenkman will play Jonathan Waxman, a painter being honored with a retrospective exhibition, prompting him to look at his life, work and relationships. Call it the portrait of an artist at a crossroads.
In the 1992 MTC run, Linney played a German arts journalist, Grete, who grills Jonathan about his work. In the revival (marking the play's Broadway debut), she is his ex-lover, Patricia.
Ana Reeder plays Grete and Byron Jennings is Patricia's archeologist lover, Nick, this spring. Daniel Sullivan (Proof) directs Sight Unseen.
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