NY Int'l Festival Presents VERITAS at The Beechman Theater, 6/16

The award-winning "Veritas" by Stan Richardson will be presented on Thursday, June 16th at 7:00 pm at The Laurie Beechman Theater (located inside West Bank Café) at 407 West 42nd Street (@ Ninth Ave) as part of the New York International Festival presents THE FringeBENEFITS SERIES; which is offering a taste of 15 of the most beloved shows from the past 15 years of FringeNYC. "Veritas" is the story of a group of young men at Harvard in 1920 whose promising futures fell prey to Harvard's "Secret Court": a gay witch-hunt conducted by school administration to purge Harvard of all homosexuality. The reading is directed by Mr. Richardson. The Musical Director is Matthew Aument with Musical Arrangements by Rachel Peters. The full cast will be announced soon. The running time will be 1hr 40mins.  For more information, visit: www.VeritasThePlay.com 

Veritas makes New York Fringe history by selling out its entire run a week before opening night last year. At the Fringe's closing night ceremony, Veritas was awarded the Fringe's Overall Excellence Award for Best Ensemble. In September the play was profiled in the Harvard Crimson-the student newspaper that eight years ago originally broke the story of the Secret Court. Veritas also received a 2010 Summer Festivals citation from Talkin' Broadway recognizing "new plays and musicals selected by our panel of jurors as ready to move to the next level of production and development, and to performers of demonstrated excellence." Sam Underwood also receives a citation for his performance as Joseph Lumbard.

May 13, 1920: Cyril Wilcox, Class of 1922, on temporary withdrawal from Harvard due to nervous illness, is found dead from asphyxiation by gas in his childhood bedroom in Fall River, Massachusetts. His family discovers letters from friends, including Ernest Weeks Roberts, also Class of ‘22 and the son of a prominent former MA congressman, implicating Cyril in an underground homosexual community at Harvard. A week later Cyril's older brother, George Lester Wilcox ('14), tracks down Harry Dreyfus, the owner Café Dreyfus and a recent lover of Cyril's, and violently extracts from him the names of known homosexuals at Harvard. He then visits Acting Dean of the College with these letters and names, demanding that Harvard take some action. The following day, Dean Greenough and President A. Lawrence Lowell, along with three other deans, covertly form "The Court." May 26-June 2: The proctor of Perkins Hall delivers to The Court a list of frequent attendees at "bitch parties" held in room 28 of Ernest Weeks Roberts. The first round of trials begins, including Roberts, Kenneth Day, a track star and Cyril's former roommate, Eugene Cummings, a dentistry student and family friend of the Wilcoxes, and Joseph Lumbard, speaking in defense of his effeminate roommate Edward Say who had been much named in the letters and interrogations. June 3-10: An informal conversation between the Asst. Dean and med student Nathaniel Wollf ('23) triggers a second wave of trials. Among those interrogated are Wollf, his sometime-lover Keith Smerage ('21), a newly-minted member of the Harvard Dramatic Club, Stanley Gilkey (23), who admitted an interest in homosexuality, but solely through the lens of criminology. The next day Cummings commits suicide by poison at the Infirmary just before The Court hands down its verdicts. The "guilty"-including Roberts, Day, Say, Cummings, Wollf and Smerage et al-are forced to leave Cambridge immediately. March-June, 2002: A box marked "Secret Court" is found in the University Archives. After much bureaucratic wrangling, the University releases to the Harvard Crimson a redacted version of the records.

Stan Richardson is a playwright and director from St. Louis, Missouri living in New York City. His plays, which include Veritas, The Children (New York Musical Theatre Festival; with composer HAl Goldberg), The Tale of the Good Whistleblower of Chaillot's Caucasian Mother and Her Other Children of a Lesser Marriage Chalk Circle (with composer Rachel Peters), wHormone and All the World's Problems, have received workshops and readings at such venues as Second Stage, Ars Nova, Classic Stage Company, Dixon Place, PS122, The Brick Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. His play, Another Brief Encounter, was published in Plays & Playwrights 2007. An alumnus of NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Edward Albee's Playwrights' Workshop, and a former resident of Albee's "Barn," Stan is a contributor to nytheatre.com and a proud member of The Dramatists Guild of America. He is also a founding member of Key Party, creating apartment theatre in collaboration with actor/director Matt Steiner.
Tickets are $20 plus a $15 food/drink minimum. To purchase tickets please call 212-352-3101 or purchase on line:  at: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/8966125;jsessionid=97E3A10900F799F0935884C37CFB6FB4.

 

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