Brandon Victor Dixon and More to Star in FOCUS Reading Directed by Jason Alexander

Carl and Jennifer Pasbjerg will present a private industry reading of FOCUS, a new play by Alex Webb (Amelia, blackandblue), which will be directed by Emmy and Tony Award winner Jason Alexander. The readings, by invitation only, will be held Thursday, April 24 and Friday, April 25 in New York City. 
 
In Focus, a group of strangers are brought together to conduct a focus group about an unknown product. Ice-breakers, artisanal snacks, and clever banter get the group going. It’s fun and easy…until it’s not.
 
Alex Webb’s FOCUS was a semi-finalist for the Burton Playwriting Award and previously had sold-out readings with Theater 808 and Ground Up Productions. Webb’s first play, Amelia, had its world premiere at the Washington Stage Guild, where it was a Critic’s Pick of the Washington Post and was subsequently published by Samuel French. His play, blackandblue, was an O’Neill Conference Semi-Finalist.
 
Last season, Jason Alexander made his Broadway directorial debut with The Cottage. Best known as George Costanza in “Seinfeld,” he has worked as a writer; composer; TV, stage, video, and film director; producer; and acting teacher. For his work on “Seinfeld,” he received six Emmy nominations, and several other awards and nominations. He is the recipient of the Actors’ Fund Julie Harris Award for Lifetime Achievement and a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, for which he also wrote the libretto. In L.A., he served as the artistic director for the Reprise Theatre Company and helmed innovative stage productions including The God of Hell (Geffen); Broadway Bound (Odyssey); Native Gardens (Pasadena Playhouse); Reprise’s The Fantasticks; Sunday in the Park with George; and a revamped production of Damn Yankees for which he authored a revised libretto featuring predominantly Latino and African American actors and set in the 1980s. He also directed the world premiere of The Joy Wheel (Ruskin Theatre), the acclaimed production of Steven Levenson’s If I Forget (Fountain Theatre), the world premiere of Windfall by Scooter Pietsch (Arkansas Rep) and again at The Bay Street Theatre, and a lauded new production of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years at Syracuse Stage.
 
The cast for the readings will feature three-time Tony Award nominee Brandon Victor Dixon (Broadway: Hell’s Kitchen, Shuffle Along..., The Color Purple), Spencer Garrett (Film: Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood, Air Force One), Erin Mackey (Broadway: Wicked, Anything Goes, Chaplin), Shirley Rumierk (TV: “Rise,” “Manifest,” “Teenage Bounty Hunters”) and Shirleyann Kaladjian (Film: The Greatest Beer Run Ever, TV: “American Horror Story”).