Yale Rep to Present 'Happy Now?' 10/24

Yale Repertory Theatre (James Bundy, Artistic Director; Victoria Nolan, Managing Director) will present the American premiere of HAPPY NOW? by Lucinda Coxon, directed by Liz Diamond, at Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street), October 24-November 15.  Opening Night is October 30.

 
Lucinda Coxon's HAPPY NOW?, a painfully truthful, darkly comic new play about having it all, debuted at London's National Theatre in 2008 and was hailed by The Daily Telegraph as "the best new play to arrive on the British stage for at least a year."

 
In HAPPY NOW?, a chance encounter at a hotel plays upon Kitty's mind as she struggles to balance personal freedom with family life, fidelity and a demanding job. Her husband is more interested in misplaced apostrophes than in their marriage, her parents are looking down the barrel of oblivion, and although she toys with the idea of joining a gym, Kitty's running out of time for big changes. HAPPY NOW? dares to ask just that, in this painfully truthful, darkly comic take on contemporary life and how to survive it.

 
Playwright Lucinda Coxon has worked at The Bush Theatre, Soho Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, and The National Theatre in London; and in the US at South Coast Repertory, Magic Theatre, and Ohio Theatre in New York.  Her plays include Waiting at the Water's Edge, Wishbones, Three Glances, The Ice Palace, Nostalgia, Vesuvius, I Am Angela Brazil by Angela Brazil, The Shoemaker's Incredible Wife, and Happy Now?  Her screenplays include Spaghetti Slow, The Heart of Me, Lilacs, and Wild Target which is scheduled to shoot in the UK in September starring Bill Nighy.  She has just finished work on The Danish Girl, a screen adaptation of David Ebershoff's novel; and is currently writing a new play, Persistent Illusions, for The National Theatre.

 
Director Liz Diamond is a Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre and serves as Chair of the Directing Department at Yale School of Drama.  Previous Yale Rep productions include the world premiere of Marcus Gardley's dance of the holy ghosts: a play on memory; Richard Nelson's translation of Strindberg's Miss Julie; Sunil Kuruvilla's Fighting Words (American premiere) and Rice Boy (world premiere); Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy; Paul Schmidt's translations of Moliere's The School for Wives and Brecht's St. Joan of the Stockyards; and the world premieres of Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play (also at The Public Theater) and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.  A longtime collaborator of Parks, Liz also directed the world premieres of Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third at BACA Downtown and Betting on the Dust Commander at the Working Theater.  National credits include Lisa Loomer's Distracted, Octavio Solis's Gibraltar, and Kenneth Cavander's translation of Euripides' The Trojan Women (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); Racine's Phedre (American Repertory Theatre); and Of Mice and Men (Arena Stage).  Liz is a winner of the OBIE Award and Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Direction, and has won fellowships and grants for her work from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Asian Cultural Council, and the SDC Foundations. She currently serves as Artistic Advisor to the Women's Project, where most recently she directed the critically-acclaimed production of Catherine Trieschmann's Crooked.