THE MORNING LINE. DATE: Friday, January 6, Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh. 13, including this page

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1 DATE: Friday, January 6, 2017 THE MORNING LINE FROM: PAGES: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh 13, including this page

2 C2 By Michael Paulson January 6, 2017 Mark Ruffalo to Star in The Price on Broadway The actor Mark Ruffalo is returning to Broadway, a decade after his first and only appearance there, to star in a revival of Arthur Miller s The Price. Mr. Ruffalo is replacing a fellow movie star, John Turturro, who had been scheduled to star in the play but is withdrawing, citing an unspecified film commitment. The play, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 16 and to open March 16 at the American Airlines Theater, is about a policeman returning to his childhood home in Manhattan to sell off his parents estate and, in the process, reckoning with his life choices and relationships. Mr. Ruffalo will play the returning son, Victor Franz. Jessica Hecht will play his wife, Tony Shalhoub his estranged brother, and Danny DeVito a furniture dealer. While Mr. Ruffalo s breakout role was onstage, in Kenneth Lonergan s This Is Our Youth, his only Broadway credit was in the 2006 revival of Awake and Sing!, a play by Clifford Odets. He was nominated for a Tony Award as best featured actor. ( Nobody slings it with more panache than Mark Ruffalo, the soulful movie and stage actor making his Broadway debut here, Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times.) Mr. Ruffalo has been nominated three times for Academy Awards, for Spotlight, Foxcatcher and The Kids Are All Right, but is perhaps best known for his portrayal of the Hulk in the Avengers films. The Price was first staged on Broadway in 1968, and has been revived three times since, most recently in This year s revival is a production of the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, and will be directed by Terry Kinney, a co-founder of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. The play is scheduled to have a limited run ending May 7.

3 C4 January 6, 2017 Review: What if Until Death Do Us Part Means a Hundred Days? By Ben Brantley Say, how would you like to spend 90 minutes with a very married young couple telling you all about how they met and fell in love (at first sight!) and took a crazy road trip together? Among prospects for a thrilling night out, this one would appear to rank with watching slides of your accountant s vacation in Brussels. But Shaun and Abigail Bengson, singing songwriters who perform as (yep) the Bengsons, turn out to be surprisingly stimulating company. Their concert-style memoir, Hundred Days, part of this year s Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater, may suggest a musical variation on an anecdote-laden wedding announcements in a Sunday newspaper. But this production, directed with a slithery ominousness by the gifted Anne Kauffman, takes you places you don t expect to go, even though you ve most likely visited such places yourself. I m talking about those frightening realms of speculation that spring into being when you ve fallen hard for a certain, seemingly inevitable someone and start thinking how it could all go so wrong, so fast. As composers of folk rock that swerves between hearty gregariousness and moody introspection, the Bengsons have been steadily insinuating themselves into downtown New York theater in recent seasons. They have made memorable musical contributions to plays that include the Classic Stage Company s Iphigenia in Aulis, and The Place We Built at the Flea Theater. Hundred Days, a longtime work in progress that has been shaped into its current form in collaboration with Ms. Kauffman and the playwright Sarah Gancher, places the Bengsons front and center as performers. They do not at first seem to wear the spotlight as a second skin. The pale, bespectacled, guitar-playing Mr. Bengson has the look of a Lutheran Woody Allen, the sort of guy you d expect to find at a party alone in the kitchen. In her sparkling lace mini-dress and made-for-stomping boots, Ms. Bengson is a flashier presence. But she, too, exudes the slight uneasiness of someone surprised by the presence of a paying audience. Yet this anxiety feeds and nourishes what makes Hundred Days so affecting. What starts out as a lively celebration of being romantically blessed Shaun and Abigail moved in together (into his tiny Astoria, Queens, studio) almost as soon as they met turns into a haunting meditation on mortality. It s scary being so unconditionally in love, because you have so much to lose. Or, as the Shakespeare sonnet has it, Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate. For Abigail, such worries take the form of ostensibly prophetic dreams about Shaun s being afflicted with an illness that leaves him only a hundred days to live, and Ms. Bengson delivers the pain of these thoughts with a

4 Janis Joplinesque rawness. In Mr. Bengson s more contemplative solos, Shaun summons a loop of scenarios in which Abigail leaves him, again and again. Assisted by a charming quartet of backup singers-cum-musicians Colette Alexander, Geneva Harrison, Jo Lampert and Reggie D. White the Bengsons enter into interior dialogues with themselves in which fears become more substantial than reality, and their music slides from hootenanny jubilation into eerie, echoey dissonance. If the spoken dialogue never matches the emotional complexity of the Bengsons songs, it paves the runway for the liftoff of the music. Like Dave Malloy, the composer of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and Ghost Quartet, the Bengsons find the unexpected harmony in angst and indecision. They offer luminous hope that a new generation of talent in American theater is taking up Stephen Sondheim s mantle of exquisite ambivalence.

5 C5 January 6, 2017 Review: The Fever Finds That Friendliness Can Be Contagious By Charles Isherwood We often pay lip service to the idea that theater is a sort of secular communal rite, but the description applies precisely to The Fever, a lovely, haunting meditation on human connection, and disconnection, created by the innovative company 600 Highwaymen, and presented in the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater. Written and directed by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone (600 Highwaymen is their nom de theater), in collaboration with Brandon Wolcott, Emil Abramyan and Eric Southern, the production intimately but unfussily incorporates audience members, who are ranged around a central playing space in rectangular formation. There is just one row of seating, and the chairs are nestled closely together, so that you re literally rubbing elbows with your neighbor, and the lights remain on for most of the 75-minute running time. The show begins with Ms. Browde and Mr. Silverstone, casually dressed and seated among the audience, describing a party hosted by a woman named Marianne. Volunteers stand to represent Marianne and some of her guests, although for the most part the audience members do not speak. The description of the party is fairly mundane ( Someone left their car lights on, and the battery went dead ), but an afterglow of unexpected emotional camaraderie lingers. As Ms. Browde says at one point: And when we were outside, you said to me: Wouldn t it be nice if it was only us. Just these people here at this party. If we were the only ones. Wouldn t it be just perfect. What follows is more abstract, but plays upon the idea of friendly interaction among comparative strangers. Another performer, Tommer Peterson, the oldest, with gray hair and spectacles, rises and invites audience members to join him, and then to catch him as he falls, to rearrange his arms as he lies on the ground, to help him get up. It s a simple but moving image of sympathetic feeling between strangers, and a poetic evocation of our mostly unspoken and un-called-upon dependence on one another. Much of show is made up of exchanges that could almost be described as the kind of mixer games made to foster fellowship among colleagues at corporate retreats. I know: shudder! But in The Fever, they are infused with a humble physical and literary poetry that scrapes away synthetic sentimentality. I never had the feeling that we were about to be asked to sing a chorus of Kumbaya. In some of the exchanges, the audience volunteers wordlessly, and without apparent instruction, to mimic the simple movement of the actors. These actions are performed with such an unforced naturalness that you realize that we all possess a natural, physical instinct and an ability to communicate with one another, to connect. We just aren t in the habit of using it, except among a small circle of intimates.

6 At one point, I found myself thinking of my subway ride to the theater and how we all sat in the same proximity with one another as the audience members did at the show. But of course on the subway you sit as if in a walled-off cell from the person just an inch away from you, and God forbid you should inadvertently catch someone s eye. Like their equally wonderful The Record at this festival two years ago, The Fever seeks to break down those unseen walls we all put up around us, to acknowledge that we are all here. Together. Now.

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AUDITION INFORMATION ALMOST, MAINE

AUDITION INFORMATION ALMOST, MAINE Written by John Cariani Directed by Matthew Watson Audition Dates: Aug 5 & 6, 2018 Performance Dates: Sept 27-Oct 14, 2018 CONTENTS AUDITION PACKET WELCOME 3 ABOUT OUR