Third Rail Repertory Theatre Presents MIDDLETOWN by Will Eno

Dates: Sep 26 - Oct 19, 2014, Thursday-Saturday at 7:30pm, Sunday at 2pm.

Location: Winningstad Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, Portland, OR 97205

Tickets Available: By phone at 503.235.1101, online at thirdrailrep.org, or Portland'5 Centers for the Arts Box Office (1111 SW Broadway)

Prices: Single tickets $24 - $47 (plus online service fees).

Third Rail opens our season with a play we have been dying to produce since it was the hit of Portland Center Stage's 2009 JAW Festival, MIDDLETOWN by Will Eno. The residents of Middletown lead lives that are probably not too different from ours. They wake up, go to work, say hello to their neighbors, fix the plumbing, seek advice on parenting, and try to live lives that are as rewarding as possible. It's all fairly ordinary. And yet...ordinary doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this quirky, word-frenzied, refraction of OUR TOWN. MIDDLETOWN is a quizzical fable about life in all its sweetness and pain, joy and wonder, beginnings and endings.

Cast: Bruce Burkhartsmeier*, Diane Kondrat, Damon Kupper*, Amy Newman, Ben Newman, Mike O'Connell*, Darius Pierce, Maureen Porter*, Jennifer Rowe, Karen Trumbo*

Will Eno recently made his Broadway debut with his critically acclaimed new play, The Realistic Joneses. Eno received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award. His plays The Open House and Title and Deed premiered at the Pershing Square Signature Center in 2014 and 2012 respectively. The Realistic Joneses also premiered in the spring of 2012, at the Yale Repertory Theater. Both 2012 plays were named in a short list of Best Plays in the New York Times. His critically acclaimed play Middletown (Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play, 2010) received its premiere in winter 2010 at the Vineyard Theatre, and was then produced at Steppenwolf Theatre. His collection of short plays entitled Oh, The Humanity and other exclamations premiered at The Flea Theater in 2007 starring Marisa Tomei and Brian Hutchison. Eno's internationally heralded play Thom Pain (based on nothing) had a successful year long run at the DR2 in New York, after a sold out run at the 2004 International Edinburgh Festival, where it won all the major awards, and then transferred to the Soho Theatre in London. The play is now being produced across the United States, as well as Brazil, Italy, Germany, France, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Mexico and other countries.Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Eno's play The Flu Season received the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for the best debut production in New York by an American playwright. His play Gnit, an adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, premiered at the Actor's Theatre of Louisville, in the Humana Festival, in the spring of 2013.

Marcella Crowson has been working in the theatre professionally for nearly 25 years. It started with playing a clown in a backyard circus with the neighborhood kids, and lead her, decades later, to such companies as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Portland Center Stage, and many others. She is a producer, director and designer; she has been a stage manager, production manager, puppet-maker, and actress (among other things). Marcella has long worked for Oregon Children's Theatre as the Artistic Director of their Educational Theatre Program in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente since 2006. For Oregon Children's Theatre Marcella has directed The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, On the Eve ofFriday Morning, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Drammy Award winning Zombie in Love. This is her first collaboration with Third Rail Repertory Theatre.

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