Medicine Show Theatre Presents The Theory of Color

Medicine Show Theatre will end its 37th Season with The Theory of Color, a new play by Lella Heins about a worldly female artist whose life begins to unravel when she and her husband move from Manhattan to a remote hamlet in the middle of nowhere.

Directed by Alexander Harrington (The Burial at Thebes, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 at LaMama), the show runs from July 12th through the 29th with an opening scheduled for Friday, July 20th at Medicine Show Theatre, 549 West 52nd St., 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th Ave.).

The play "tells the story of Elena, a worldly Italian-born artist who finds herself transplanted from New York City to a small, sleepy, remote island when her husband Tom accepts a new job as the town doctor. Arriving at the end of the summer vacation season, Tom and Elena soon meet several of the local "townies" including a priest with a penchant for the bottle, a schizophrenic who's convinced that the other townspeople are out to kill her, and a young man experiencing serious jitters about his upcoming wedding. While Tom is enthralled with the "normalcy" of small-town life, Elena is driven to distraction by the depression and unhappiness that she sees around her. As the long winter months drag by, she starts to realize that Tom may not be the man she thought he was," state press notes.

Featured in the cast are: Geoff Wigdor (young Robert De Niro in the feature film Sleepers, guest leads on television's "ER," "Law and Order" and "Third Watch"); James Nugent (many roles at off-Broadway's Pearl Theatre), Celeste Moratti (Dario D'Ambrosi's Crazy Sound at La Mama) as well as Charlotte Patton, Alexandra Devin, Niall O'Hegerty and Kathryn Savannah. 

Heines has been a member of the Actors Studio Playwrights Unit since 1988. Her play Jean was produced by Halcyon Theatre and, with Tammy Grimes in the lead, at a concert reading at LTV Studios in the Hamptons. Among her other credits: Valentina (produced as part of The Actors Studio Short Play Festival and by The Magellan Theatre Project at the Ohio Theatre), the prose-poem-play Baudelaire (AC Space in London, Medicine Show Theatre), The Move and In the Bedroom (Spazio Zazie in Milan, Italy). Oriundina, the Siren of Itaparica, a musical play with music by Carman Moore, won a Lower Manhattan Culture Council grant and was presented by LaMama Theatre as part of their Experiments '04 series and at Gallery27 Plus. In 2003 Medicine Show Theatre produced six of her short plays under the title Lion Taming in Miami and Other Views of Life, also directed by Mr. Harrington. She has adapted short stories by Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant.

Scenic and Lighting Design is by Tony Penna, costumes are by Viviane Galloway and paintings are by Caterina Bertolotto. 

The Theory of Color is produced as part of Medicine Show's Jump-Start series, which presents readings of promising new works and awards full productions to the best of those. The play received its initial Jump-Start reading in the 2005-2006 season.

The performance schedule is Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 4 PM. Tickets are $18 and are available from Smarttix at (212) 868-4444 or via the web at www.Smarttix.com. For more information, please log onto the company's website at www.MedicineShowTheatre.org.