Tom Hewitt to Star with Clark and Gaines in When Ladies Meet Reading, Feb. 27

More casting has been announced for the upcoming staged reading of the Rachel Crothers play When Ladies Meet, which will be presented on Monday, February 27 at 7 pm at the Culture Project (45 Bleecker Street). Tom Hewitt is among the actors who have joined the production.

Hewitt (Dracula, The Rocky Horror Show) will join Tony-winning actors Victoria Clark (The Light in the Piazza, Titanic) and Boyd Gaines (Contact, She Loves Me, The Heidi Chronicles). Also new to the cast are Lauren Hatcher, Marceline Hugo, Angela Pierce, Erika Rolsfrud, Erik Steele, and Spiff Weigand (on piano). The reading will be directed by Melvin Bernhardt (Tony for Da, nominated for Crimes of the Heart).

The evening will benefit The Acting Company's education programs in New York City, including Literacy Through Theater artistic residencies, in-school productions and student matinees during the Company's New York Season.

"One of an Acting Company series of staged readings of rarely produced plays, When Ladies Meet's sharp, witty dialogue focuses on a publisher's mistress who unwittingly becomes friendly with the publisher's wife. When the two women get together to discuss the characters of a new book one of them is writing, they are unaware that they both love the same man—just like the characters in the novel," state press notes.

Originally produced on Broadway in 1932, When Ladies Meet is one of 30 Broadway plays written (and sometimes directed) by Crothers, an American playwright whose works many consider reflected the position of women in American society more accurately than those of any other dramatist of her time. During World War I Crothers founded the Stage Women's Relief Fund, and in 1932 she helped found the Stage Relief Fund, of which she remained a director until 1951. In 1940 she led in organizing the American Theatre Wing, which operated the famed Stage Door Canteen, and remained its executive director until 1950.

Founded by John Houseman and Margot Harley along with Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone and other members of Juilliard's Drama Division's first graduating class, The Acting Company has just begun its 34th National Tour (The Three Musketeers, Macbeth and The Lottery, which it commissioned Jeffrey Hatcher to adapt from Shirley Jackson's short story) to universities and small communities prior to its New York Season at the Nagelberg Theater. Producing 122 plays since 1972, The Acting Company has helped develop the careers of Jeffrey Wright, Jesse L. Martin, Frances Conroy, Harriet Harris, Rainn Wilson and hundreds of others in addition to Kline and LuPone and collected a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater.

Tickets, which range from $35 to $55, can be purchased by calling The Acting Company at (212) 258-3lll. For more information, visit www.theactingcompany.org.