The 2008 Season Shows
Rumors by Neil Simon, dir. John McIlwee
June 4 - June 15
One of Neil Simon's most popular plays, Rumors is a farce about four couples who are at the townhouse of a
deputy New York City mayor and his wife to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary.
The party never begins because the host has shot himself in the head (it's only a flesh wound)
and his wife is missing. His lawyer's coverup, gets progressively more difficult to sustain as
the other guests arrive and nobody can remember who has been told what about whom.
Doors slam and hilarity abounds as the couples get more and more crazed.
"Light, frothy and fun." - N.Y. Post.
"Has nothing on its mind except making the audience laugh." - N.Y. Times
"Neil Simon makes people laugh a lot!" - USA Today
"Not only side splitting, but front and back splitting." - NBC TV
The Robber Bridegroom, dir. Matthew Jason Willis
June 18 - June 29
A rousing, bawdy Southern fairy tale set in eighteenth century Mississippi, The Robber Bridegroom is the story
of the courting of Rosamund,
the only daughter of the richest planter in the country, by Jamie Lockhart,
a rascally robber of the woods. The proceedings go awry, thanks to an unconventional case of double-mistaken identity.
Throw in an evil stepmother intent on Rosamund's demise, her pea-brained henchman and a hostile talking head-in-a-trunk,
and you have the recipe for a rollicking country romp. It’s one of the only genuine bluegrass scores ever heard in a
Broadway musical, giving this unusual tale of the Natchez Trace a distinctive sound all its own.
True West by Sam Shepard, dir. Lauren Kennedy
July 2 - July 13
Recently revived at New York's Circle in the Square, where Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly
alternated playing the roles of the brothers, this American classic explores alternatives that
might spring from the demented terrain of the California landscape. Sons of a desert dwelling alcoholic
and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to
producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to
Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale.
"Shepard's masterwork ... It tells us a truth, as glimpsed by a 37 year old genius." - N.Y. Post
"It's clear, funny, naturalistic. It's also opaque, terrifying, surrealistic. If that sounds contradictory,
you're on to one aspect of Shepard's winning genius; the ability to make you think you're watching one thing
while at the same time he's presenting another." - San Francisco Chronicle
Skylight by David Hare, dir. Kristen Coury
July 23 - August 3
Broadway and the West End applauded this intensely clear sighted and compassionate play about a love affair.
Kyra is surprised to see the son of her former lover at her apartment in a London slum.
He hopes she will reconcile with his distraught, now widowed, father. Tom, a restless, self-made restaurant
and hotel tycoon, arrives later that evening, unaware of his son's visit. Kyra, who was his invaluable
business associate and a close family friend until his wife discovered their affair, has since found
a vocation teaching underprivileged children. Is the gap between them unbridgeable, or can they resurrect
their relationship? Originally produced at London's Royal National Theatre, Skylight won the Guardian's
coveted Best New Play award.
"David Hare's luminously beautiful and wildly truthful Skylight is deeply and truly about people ... It is a
fascinating play ... [that] tears at the heart ... Theatre going today doesn't get much better than this." - N.Y. Post
"Absolutely splendid." - N.Y. Times
Personals by Marta Kaufman, Alan Menken, Stephen Schwartz, and others, dir. Tito Hernandez
August 6 - August 17
Written by the creators of the hit TV show Friends, with music by several popular writers including Stephen Schwartz
and Alan Menken (Wicked, Disney's Enchanted, Beauty and the Beast), this is a wonderful
collection of songs about people who place lonely hearts ads: lonely people looking for that certain someone.
In other words: Personals is about Most of Us, about the unending search for love in the Post Me Decade.
"Are you looking for that 'special' night where everything is going to be peachy, and you are going to meet the
swellest little show of your dreams? ... Personals is a winner, destined to find, apart from anything else,
its own special place on the singles scene, the date show for the young in heart, the Jacques Brel of the '80s." - N.Y. Post
Gods of Autumn (World Premiere) written and directed by Tony-nominated writer Jack Murphy
August 20 - August 31
Gods of Autumn is a play about how three very different people who never would have met in the course of
their normal lives, are thrown together to face their own mortality. But it's really not so much a story of how
we die as it is a story about how we live. As one of the characters, Mary, says "Maybe you just have to take your best
guess and keep heading west like Columbus -- keep telling the crew something’s out there just over the horizon ...
something solid and constant and true, and then hope to God there is. Maybe, that’s what life is all about --
holding on and hoping."