David Greenspan's She Stoops to Comedy has been added to Playwrights Horizons 2002-2003 season, in the Studio Series.
The work is written, directed and acted by Greenspan, and will be the first staging in PH's new, intimate Peter Jay Sharp Theater at 416 W. 42nd Street come April 2003. The new building is currently under construction and includes a mainstage space. The prestigious not-for-profit devoted to writers presented its 2001-2002 season at borrowed spaces and will do so for part of the 2002-2003 season, until the world premiere of Richard Nelson and Ricky Ian Gordon's My Life With Albertine christens the new Playwrights Horizons new Mainstage Theater Feb 21-March 30, 2003.
Directors and dates for the fall season were announced July 19. She Stoops to Comedy is billed as "a play-within-a-play about an actress who schemes to woo back her estranged lover by playing Orlando opposite her lover's Rosalind in a summer stock production of As You Like It." It's called "a farcical, gender-bending boulevard romp." Dates are April 3-27, 2003.
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The 2002-2003 season for Playwrights Horizons, the respected Manhattan not-for-profit devoted to new works, will premiere two musicals, including a new Ricky Ian Gordon-Richard Nelson collaboration inspired by Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Their My Life With Albertine will be directed by Nelson. The playwright has turned literature into Tony Award gold in the past: For PH, he adapted James Joyce's short story, "The Dead," into an Irish folk-driven musical, James Joyce's The Dead. The Off-Broadway show moved to the Belasco on Broadway in 2000 for a brief run and has popped up regionally since. Nelson won the Tony for Best Book for the show. Ricky Ian Gordon is the downtown writer known for Dream True and art songs for the recording "Bright Eyed Joy." The writers will share lyric credit, with Gordon penning music and lyrics and Nelson penning book and lyrics. The show is drawn from the "Albertine" sections of the Proust epic, and has an older Marcel narrating the story of his tempestuous love affair with his muse, the middle-class Albertine. The season also includes:
- Keith Bunin's The World Over, directed by Tim Vasen, Sept. 6-Oct. 13, at The Duke on 42nd Street. The play, originally announced as a project for Michael Mayer, is a quirky epic adventure about a man who believes he's a prince and travels the world to claim his birthright. Bunin penned PH's The Credeaux Canvas.
- Christopher Shinn's What Didn't Happen, directed by Michael Wilson, Nov. 15-Dec. 22, at The Duke on 42nd Street. The play by the 26-year-old playwright concerns a young writer and his mentor. Shinn's work has been embraced in London and who got attention this season for the Worth Street Theatre-Manhattan Theatre Club productions of Four, his spare view of yearning, contemporary Americans set on the Fourth of July.
- Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, directed by Moises Kaufman, May 2-June 8, 2003, at Playwrights Horizons' Mainstage Theater. The work by the author of Quills is about a real-life East German cross-dresser living through 20th century political turmoil. Jefferson Mays stars in the show that has had developmental readings at the La Jolla Playhouse and Sundance Theater Lab. Kaufman created The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency.
- Wilder, by Jack Herrick and Mike Craver (of the Red Clay Ramblers) and Erin Cressida Wilson, directed by Lisa Portes, June 3-29, 2003, at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Studio Theater. The work concerns an old man who returns to a brothel he knew in his younger days, and is based on the play Cross-Dressing in the Depression by Erin Cressida Wilson.
