NewsLaBute and Guare Among Playwrights for Seven Card Draw at Dixon PlaceNew monologues by playwrights Neil LaBute and John Guare will be featured in Five Story Walk Up: Seven Card Draw, a three-night presentation of new works, at Dixon Place.
By
Ernio Hernandez
February 23, 2010
The show — which reunites the seven scribes from the original benefit Five Story Walk Up in 2007 — will play March 16-18. LaBute (Reasons to Be Pretty) and Guare (Six Degrees of Separation) are joined by Clay McLeod Chapman, Quincy Long, Laura Shaine, Daniel F. Levin and the show's producer-director Daniel Gallant (Nuyorican Poets Cafe executive director).
Seven Card Draw, according to press notes, "features darkly comic tales of risk and reward." Here is how each piece is characterized:
What It Was Like - Guare’s monologue "describes life in 1970s Manhattan, when the author was living in John Lennon's former apartment and watching the city fall apart while building his own theatrical career."
The Huntsmen - Long's short play "in which a lawyer discovers that his son may have committed a violent crime and must decide whether to protect or prosecute."
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Beware of Waiter — Shaine's "dark screwball comedy in which a young urbanite couple visits an eccentric restaurant and meets a waiter who is secretly obsessed with an endangered species."
Celebrated monologist Chapman will perform "a chilling new work."
What Really Happened, Starring Abraham Lincoln - Levin "conjures a haunted historical re-enactment."
Determined to Prove - Gallant pens a tale of "a sheepish young man [who] uses a Shakespeare monologue to pull off an elaborate con."
Totally - LaBute rounds out the evening with this monologue "in which a young woman exacts an unusual revenge against her philandering mate." The plays and monologues of the original Five Story Walk Up, which raised more than $20,000 for the 13th Street Repertory Theater, were subsequently published in Applause Books’ anthology "The Best American Short Plays of 2007-2008."