James Lapine, fresh from directing and co-conceiving Claudia Shear's lauded Off-Broadway play, Dirty Blonde, has The Moment When waiting in the wings, at Playwrights Horizons.
The world premiere drama written by Lapine, and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, will star Arija Bareikis (The Last Night of Ballyhoo and "Snow Falling On Cedars"), Kieran Culkin (the film of "The Cider House Rules"), Illeana Douglas (TV's "Action"), Estelle Parsons ("Bonnie and Clyde," "Roseanne") and Mark Ruffalo (This is Our Youth).
Previews begin Feb 18 at Playwrights on 42nd Street in Manhattan. Official opening is set for March 12. Performances continue to March 26.
In The Moment When, according to production notes, "a hotshot book jacket artist, a novelist, and an agent's young assistant meet at a quintessential literary soiree. Their lives become inexorably linked, and forever changed. Over the course of fifteen years, families are formed and unformed, careers are made and unmade, and lives are uprooted in pursuit of an elusive happiness."
Designers are Eugene Lee (sets), Ann Roth (costumes), Yael Lubetzky (lighting) and David Van Tieghem (sound). As a librettist, Lapine (and Stephen Sondheim) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park With George, which began at Playwrights Horizons. He directed and wrote Passion (with Stephen Sondheim), Table Settings, Twelve Dreams and Luck, Pluck and Virtue, and directed Wendy Kesselman's new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, on Broadway. With William Finn, he collaborated on A New Brain and the Off-Broadway shows March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, later produced on Broadway as Falsettos.
Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg staged Broadway productions of Agnes of God and Whose Life is It Anyway?, and the original production of The Normal Heart at The Public Theater.
Tickets to The Moment When are $37.50. Playwrights Horizons produces in its Anne G. Wilder Theater, 416 W. 42nd St. For information, call (212) 279-4200,or visit the website at www.playwrightshorizons.org.
-- By Kenneth Jones
