Carrie Coon, Lindsay Crouse & More to Lead New Tracy Letts Play at Steppenwolf

Casting has been announced for the highly anticipated world premiere production of Mary Page Marlowe, written by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright and ensemble member Tracy Letts. Artistic Director Anna D. Shapiro, who directed Letts's internationally acclaimed August: Osage County, teams up with him again for this new, ambitious production in Steppenwolf's 40th anniversary season. Mary Page Marlowe runs March 31 - May 29, 2016 in the Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N Halsted St. Tickets ($20 - $89) go on sale Friday, January 29, 2016 at 11am through Audience Services (1650 N Halsted St), 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org.

Featuring a 19-member cast, seven different actors will portray Mary Page Marlowe over the span of her lifetime, from ages 18 months to 67 years. The seven actors are Carrie Coon (Gone Girl, HBO's The Leftovers, Steppenwolf's production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Lindsay Crouse, Laura T. Fisher, Caroline Heffernan, Annie Munch and Rebecca Spence. Rounding out the cast are ensemble members Ian Barford (Ray) and Alan Wilder (Andy) with Stephen Cefalu, Jr. (Ed Marlowe), Amanda Drinkall (Roberta Marlowe), Jack Edwards (Louis), Kirsten Fitzgerald (Shrink), Keith Gallagher (Ben), Sandra Marquez (Nurse), Madeline Weinstein (Wendy Gilbert) and Gary Wilmes (Dan). The remaining roles will be announced at a later date.

Mary Page Marlowe is an accountant from Ohio. She's led an ordinary life, making the difficult decisions we all face as we try to figure out who we really are and what we really want. As Tracy Letts brings us moments-both pivotal and mundane-from Mary's life, a portrait of a surprisingly complicated woman emerges. Intimate and moving, Mary Page Marlowe shows us how circumstance, impulse and time can combine to make us mysteries...even to ourselves.

"Tracy and I have a shared aesthetic gained over many years of collaborating together as actor/director and playwright/director. We have a shared vocabulary that is a full embodiment of the ensemble principle while, at the same time, challenging each other's sensibilities and ideas in complimentary ways," shares Artistic Director Anna D. Shapiro. "I look forward to embarking on this process and partnership again for this play that, for me, does what Steppenwolf Theatre does best: finding the spectacular in the mundane and turning the every-day into the most-important-day, and all the while reflecting our common humanity," added Shapiro.

BIOS:
Tracy Letts (Playwright) was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for August: Osage County, which premiered at Steppenwolf in 2007, played on Broadway, London's National Theatre and the Sydney Theatre. Steppenwolf also produced the world premieres of Letts's Superior Donuts (transferred to Broadway in 2009); and Man from Nebraska (premiered at Steppenwolf in 2003, Pulitzer Prize finalist). He wrote screenplays of three films adapted from his own plays, Killer Joe, Bug and August: Osage County. Letts received a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for Steppenwolf's production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He has been an ensemble member since 2002. He is also known for his ongoing portrayal of Andrew Lockhart in seasons three and four of Showtime's Homeland.

Anna D. Shapiro (Director) has directed dozens of notable productions with Steppenwolf, including Tracy Letts's August: Osage County, for which she received the 2008 Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Director. In 2011 she received a Tony Award nomination for her direction of The Motherf**er with the Hat, which she also directed at Steppenwolf. Broadway credits include the sold-out run of Larry David's Fish in the Dark on Broadway, the revival of Steppenwolf's production of This Is Our Youth and the Broadway revival of Of Mice and Men, which National Theatre Live selected as the first American production to be broadcast to over 700 cinemas across the US and Canada. Additional Steppenwolf directing credits include A Parallelogram, Up, The Unmentionables, The Pain and the Itch (also at Playwrights Horizons), Tracy Letts's Man from Nebraska, (named by TIME Magazine as one of the Year's Top Ten of 2003), Side Man (also in Ireland, Australia and Colorado) and Tracy Letts's Three Sisters, among others. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and Columbia College and the recipient of a 1996 Princess Grace Award, as well as the 2010 Princess Grace Statue Award. Shapiro began working with Steppenwolf in 1995 as the original director of the New Plays Lab, joined the ensemble in 2005 and became Artistic Director at the start of the 2015/16 Season.

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