Sarah Ruhl to Join John Lahr in Conversation at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 10/7

John Lahr, long-time drama critic for The New Yorker and winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for his acclaimed biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, returns to Theatre for a New Audience for a talk about his new book, JOY RIDE: Show People and Their Shows, with one of its subjects: MacArthur Fellow and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House, In The Next Room). Mr. Lahr and Ms. Ruhl will speak on Wednesday, October 7, at 7:00pm at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place.

Tickets to JOY RIDE: An Evening with John Lahr are $10 general admission and free to Theatre for a New Audience subscribers. The onstage conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A, and a book signing with Mr. Lahr and his cover designer, renowned artist Paul Davis. Books will be available for purchase in the lobby. Food & Drink will also be open in the lobby, selling snacks and light refreshments.

A collection of some of his most popular and engaging New Yorker pieces, JOY RIDE puts the plays on Mr. Lahr's watch in the context of the lives of the artists who created them. From authors such as Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Sarah Ruhl, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, and Shakespeare, to directors Mike Nichols, Nicholas Hytner, and Ingmar Bergman, the depth of Mr. Lahr's understanding is extraordinary to read. Mr. Lahr brings the reader up close and personal with artists and their processes, with plays and the playwrights, with what they seek to express, and how they express it.

"As I always saw it," explains Mr. Lahr, "my job was to keep the theatre in the public discourse, to use the platform of the magazine to write a sort of Lives of the Theatricals, to give theater-goers not just a sense of the play but a sense of the history out of which it came."

Advance praise for JOY RIDE: Show People and Their Shows: "Former New Yorker drama critic John Lahr (Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh) spotlights more brilliantly neurotic theater personalities in his latest incisive exuberant collection from the magazine... Lahr's reportage, trenchant insight, and infectious love of the stage will remind readers of how exciting modern theater can be." - Publishers Weekly

John Lahr is the author or editor of 11 books on theater, 6 volumes of collected theater criticism, and several novels and play adaptations. He was the senior drama critic of The New Yorker for over two decades, a National Book Award finalist, and has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. His biography of the murdered playwright Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, was adapted for film, and he is the first critic ever to win a Tony Award (coauthor, Elaine Stritch at Liberty).

Sarah Ruhl's plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee for best new play); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2005; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes award); Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Orlando; Demeter in the City (NAACP nomination); Late: a cowboy song; Three Sisters; and most recently, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She was a member of 13P and of New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She was recently the recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright, the Feminist Press' Forty under Forty award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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