Sigourney Weaver plays a nymphomaniac named Lulu doing battle with the religious Right in Christopher Durang's new satirical comedy, Sex and Longing, now in previews at the Cort Theatre on Broadway for an Oct. 10 opening and a limited run that ends Nov. 19.
Tickets are on sale at (212) 239-6200 or (1-800) 223 7565. You can also buy tickets through Playbill On-Line.
To coincide with the opening of Sex And Longing, tonight's episode of "City Arts," on New York's public television station, WNET (channel 13) at 8PM, will begin with a segment profiling Christopher Durang & Sigourney Weaver's work on the play.
The play--a satiric, surreal arm-wrestle between the religious right and the erotic left--features Weaver prominently in the latter camp, along with newcomer Jay Goede. These two--a nymphomaniac and a gay--strike up a friendship at a meeting for sexual compulsives and inflame moralistic right-wingers when they publish a Mapplethorpe-like "art book" titled "Explicit Photographs of the Last 300 People We Slept With."
Cast as their adversaries are Peter Michael Goetz (the father in Broadway's Brighton Beach Memoirs) as a nationally known televangelist and Dana Ivey (the matriarch in Off-Broadway's Driving Miss Daisy) as the rabidly conservative wife of a U.S. senator. The senator is played by Guy Boyd, and film actor Eric Thal, who appeared in A Stranger Among Us and the movie of Six Degrees of Separation, completes the cast Garland Wright, a classmate of Durang's and Weaver's at Yale in the early 1970s, will direct.
Weaver, who has worked with Durang since their college days, expressed her enthusiasm for the play, and its timely subject matter.
The Cort is where LCT produced its Tony-winning revival of The Heiress. The Beaumont has been closed for renovations since January 1996, and is scheduled to reopen in September.
The cast began rehearsals in the Adirondacks in August -- to work around Weaver's shooting schedule for the film Alien 4,
"Originally we were going to start in September," he says, "but Sigourney has to make--or is choosing to make--Alien 4, so we have to start earlier to make the dates work out."
The whole run has been arranged around the film, which was to have started in January. Unfortunately, the start date was moved up to the fall. The studio will begin the film without Weaver, shooting around her, and she will join the picture-in-progress in mid-November when she completes the limited Broadway run. It has not been determined whether another star will replace her during the filming or whether the show will shut down and reopen when Weaver finishes the picture and becomes available to resume the run; either is possible.
The only thing certain is Lincoln Center Theatre has a spring commitment for the Cort; it will present there An American Daughter, a new play by another of Durang's Yale Drama Schoolmates, Wendy Wasserstein. Meryl Streep -- yet another Yalie from the same period -- may--just may--star.
