Skidmore Theater Announces Spring 2017 Mainstage Production

The Skidmore College Department of Theater is pleased to announce its Spring 2017 Mainstage production, Balm in Gilead by Lanford Wilson, guest directed by international award-winning theater artist Phil Soltanoff. This updated version of Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson's first full-length play brings the world of grungy 1970s New York City to vivid life on the Skidmore stage.

As one of the pioneer plays of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, Balm in Gilead debuted at La MaMa in New York City in 1966. In Skidmore Theater's production, updated to the 1970s and inspired by Steppenwolf's 1984 revival directed by John Malkovich, Balm in Gilead tells the story of the down-and-out of New York's Upper West Side set to an iconic soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Frank Sinatra and many other timely favorites.

Taking place in a gritty 24-hour diner, Balm in Gilead exists as a moment in time in the lives of twenty-five characters, featuring an unconventional structure of overlapping scenes, the contradictory combination of the realistic and the abstract, and distinctly human stories of what it is to survive in a destitute world.

FROM THE DIRECTOR: "Rumor has it playwright Lanford Wilson sat in a gritty all-night diner on the Upper West Side of mid-1960's Manhattan - and just wrote down what he heard. The result is Balm in Gilead, one of the first plays of the Off-Off Broadway movement. The play creates a world of lost souls: pushers and junkies, hustlers and whores - social outcasts struggling delicately and brutally on the edge of poverty." -Phil Soltanoff

Tickets: $12 general admission and $8 for students and senior citizens. Reserve seats online at skidmore.theater.edu or by contacting our Box Office: boxoffice@skidmore.edu or (518) 580-5439.

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