Susan Smith News

New City Stage Company concludes their fifth season with the Philadelphia professional premier of Marsha Norman's heartbreaking socio-tragedy ‘Night Mother. This penetrating and poignant play will close July 3, 2011.

New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Artistic Director; Sarah Cameron Sunde, Associate Director; Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Managing Director), the OBIE Award-winning downtown theater company founded in 1992, will present 'THE GERM PROJECT,' featuring the work of playwrights Kara Lee Corthron (directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni), Lynn Rosen (directed by Shoshana Gold), Kathryn Walat (directed by Portia Krieger), and Anna Ziegler (directed by Beatrice Terry). The four 'germs' of full-length plays of scope and adventure commissioned by New Georges for this project will be presented together, fully produced, in a cohesive and satisfying ninety-minute intermission-less evening. There will be a connective thread to the pieces that will take place with visuals and storytelling. 'THE GERM PROJECT' will be performed at 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich Street (just south of Rector). Previews will begin on June 11, and the official Opening Night will be Monday, June 20 at 8:00 p.m. Performances will run through July 9.

ORGANIC THEATER PITTSBURGH presents Sarah Ruhl's award-winning, dark comedy, Dead Man's Cell Phone, which has been described as, 'fearless, surreal, edgy, playful, lovely, quirky, delightful, and hilarious.'

Home Death, a new play by Olivier Award winner Nell Dunn, will play for six performances only on Sunday and Monday evenings from Sunday, 10 July 2011 (Press Night: Monday, 11 July 2011 at 7.30pm) at the multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre.

Ed Harris, Bill Pullman, Amy Madigan and Glenne Headly are checking into The Jacksonian, Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley's eerie world-premiere set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi circa 1964. Ed Harris, a four-time Oscar nominee and Broadway vet who recently appeared at the Geffen Playhouse in Wrecks, is Bill Perch, a dentist with ambiguous morality who goes to The Jacksonian to bury his secrets. Estranged from his wife, played by Amy Madigan (Broadway's Streetcar Named Desire and Oscar nominee for Twice in a Life Time), Perch makes his new home in the motel's unsettling world where the subversive becomes commonplace and the passage of time becomes hauntingly unpredictable. As the Perch's lives become intertwined with the inhabitants of the motel - proprietor Fred Weber played by Bill Pullman (most recently seen on Broadway in Oleanna and on-screen in HBO's Too Big to Fail) and bar tender Glenne Headly (most recognizable for her big-screen role in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and recently seen at the Geffen Playhouse in Love, Loss, and What I Wore) - the audience is taken on a surreal trip that is rife with disturbingly dark humor. Helmed by Tony Award winner and Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert Falls, The Jacksonian opens in the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse on February 8, 2012.

Producers Jean Doumanian and Sonia Friedman announced today that Academy Award-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Angela Bassett will return to the Broadway stage in the role of Camae starring opposite Academy Award-nominee Samuel L. Jackson as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Broadway production of the new play, The Mountaintop, by Katori Hall directed by Tony Award-nominee Kenny Leon (Fences, A Raisin in the Sun). The Mountaintop will begin performances on September 22, 2011, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre (242 West 45th Street), with an official opening on Thursday, October 13, 2011.

Seattle Repertory Theatre will workshop and perform two public readings of Anne Washburn's new play Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play July 15 and 16 at 7:30 p.m. in the Poncho Forum.

Tickets for the Broadway premiere of the 2010 Olivier Award® winning Best Play, The Mountaintop by Katori Hall starring Samuel L. Jackson as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., go on sale Sunday, June 12, 2011. Tickets are available at Telecharge.com or by calling 212-239-6200, and beginning August 11th at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre (242 West 45th Street).

Playwrights Horizons, under the leadership of Artistic Director Tim Sanford and Managing Director Leslie Marcus, is proud to announce the sixth and final production of its upcoming 2011/2012 Season. Completing the theater company's line-up is the New York premiere of MAPLE & VINE, a new play by Jordan Harrison (Doris to Darlene at Playwrights Horizons, Act a Lady, Amazons and Their Men), directed by Obie Award winner Anne Kauffman (The Thugs, Stunning, Naked Angels' This Wide Night, Mr. Harrison's Act a Lady).

The multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre presents Vibrant 2011 - A Festival of Finborough Playwrights, its annual festival of Finborough Playwrights, running from 5-30 July 2011. The festival features - and is centred around - a month long run of Nick Gill's Mirror Teeth

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater today announced its roster of plays for 2011-12, the award-winning company's 17th season. The all world-premiere season will feature new works by Dan Klores, Dael Orlandersmith, Daniel Talbott, José Rivera, David Adjmi and a play written by Academy-Award nominee Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network).

Wendy C. Goldberg, Artistic Director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center?s National Playwrights Conference, today announced the eight directors for plays previously selected for its 47th season.