The red-hot Drama Dept. have announced an addition to this year's schedule and a new play for next year. Adding to a season already containing Frank Pugliese's Hope Is the Thing with Feathers and the new Douglas Carter Beane (As Bees in Honey Drown) play, Country Club, the Dept. will present an evening of two one-act plays featuring The Author's Voice by Richard (Three Days of Rain) Greenberg and Imagining Brad by Peter (Good as New) Hedges.
The two one-acts will play in June at the company's regular space, The Greenwich House Theatre.
Added to next season's roster is the world premiere production of Adam Baum and the Jew Movie by Daniel Goldfarb. Adam Baum takes place in 1946 and is based on an incident involving a failed collaboration between Ring Ladner (a Drama Dept. favorite) and producer Samuel Goldwyn. Twenty-three-year-old Goldfarb, a Julliard playwrighting graduate, will receive his first major production with the show. Goldfarb's play Oedipus Jew, written when he was nineteen, was subject to producer scrunity last year. Daniel Sullivan (An American Daughter, A Fair Country) is slated to direct.
Next up is Frank Pugliese's Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, which will begin performances Nov. 11 at the Greenwich House Theatre, opening Dec. 2, under the direction of Randolph Curtis Rand. The play is about three couples from three generations whose lives intertwine, and is the first venture in a collaboration between Drama Dept. and Fine Line/New Line Cinema.
Feathers will be only the second original play proffered by the company, after Beane's successful As Bees in Honey Drown. The troupe's other mountings have all been carefully chosen and sometimes idiosyncratic revivals, such as As Thousands Cheer, June Moon, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Kingdom of Earth. June, along with Bees, transferred to an extended run Off Broadway. Rand previously directed the Dept.'s Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both he and Pugliese (Aven `U Boys) are company members. No cast has been announced for Feathers.
Feathers will run Nov. 11-22, take the Thanksgiving week off, and then resume performances for one more week.
-- By Sean McGrath and Robert Simonson
