'Glengarry Glen Ross,' With Al Pacino, Aiming for Broadway - NYTimes.com

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/glengarry-glen-ross-with-al-pacino-aiming-for-broadway/?pagemode=print[6/13/2012 9:38:31 AM]

Associated PressAl Pacino

JUNE 12, 2012, 12:02 PM

‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ With Al Pacino, Aiming for Broadway

By PATRICK HEALY

A new Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play,“Glengarry Glen Ross,” is in the works for the 2012-13 season with Al Pacino in line to play thedesperate salesman Shelly “The Machine” Levene, according to two Broadway producers with knowledgeof the plans.

Playing Shelly Levene would be a reversal of roles for Mr. Pacino, who – in the 1992 film adaptation of“Glengarry” – played the hotshot in the Chicago real estate office where Mr. Mamet’s searing comedyunfolds. Mr. Pacino was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for that performance, as RickyRoma. It would also be the latest project for Mr. Pacino and the revival’s director, Daniel Sullivan, whoworked together on the 2010 Broadway outing of “The Merchant of Venice.”

A lead producer of the “Glengarry” revival, Jeffrey Richards, declined to comment on Tuesday. He was aproducer on “Merchant of Venice” and has also mounted several Mamet plays on Broadway, mostrecently “A Life in the Theater” in 2010 and “Race” a year earlier. The information about the “Glengarry”revival came from two producers who spoke on condition of anonymity because the revival is not official,in part because negotiations with several actors are still under way.

“Glengarry” originally opened on Broadway in 1984 and was a critical hit that ran for 11 months; it wasnominated for four Tony Awards, including best play, and won for Joe Mantegna’s featured performanceas Roma. Robert Prosky played Levene in that production, and was also nominated for a featured Tony.The play was revived relatively recently on Broadway, in 2005, with Alan Alda as Levene and LievSchreiber as Roma; both men were nominated for featured Tonys, and Mr. Schreiber won. That 2005production also won for best play revival; Mr. Richards was one of its lead producers as well.

'Best Man' Looks to TV in Electing New Cast Members - NYTimes.com

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/best-man-looks-to-tv-in-electing-new-cast-members/?pagemode=print[6/13/2012 9:40:33 AM]

Chris Pizzello/AssociatedPressCybill Shepherd

JUNE 12, 2012, 4:08 PM

‘Best Man’ Looks to TV in Electing New Cast Members

By PATRICK HEALY

With four main actors scheduled to depart the show in July, the Broadwayrevival of “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” is turning to some notable televisionstars as replacements, in hopes they will help sell tickets to the tourists who dominate New York theateraudiences in summertime.

Two of the new cast members will also be making their Broadway debuts: The Emmy-nominated actressCybill Shepherd (“Cybill,” “Moonlighting”) will succeed Candice Bergen as a frustrated political wifewhose husband is vying for a presidential nomination, while Kristin Davis (Charlotte on “Sex and theCity”) will replace Kerry Butler as the southern belle married to a senator also seeking the nomination.

John Stamos (“ER,” “Full House”) will play opposite Ms. Davis as the senator, taking over the role fromEric McCormack. And Tony-winning theater veteran Elizabeth Ashley, last seen on Broadway in“Dividing the Estate,” will follow Angela Lansbury in the role of a meddling political committeewoman.

The first three actors will begin performances on July 10, and Ms. Ashley will start on July 24. Othermembers of the original cast – including two of its stars, James Earl Jones and John Larroquette – willremain with the production through its final performance scheduled for Sept. 9.

Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - The New York Times

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/theater/reviews/rapture-blister-burn-at-playwrights-horizons.html?pagewanted=print[6/13/2012 9:35:52 AM]

June 12, 2012THEATER REVIEW

Hard Choices, Same as They Ever WereBy CHARLES ISHERWOOD

A good, old-fashioned consciousness-raising session flares into life in the first act of “Rapture, Blister, Burn,”the intensely smart, immensely funny new play by Gina Gionfriddo that opened Tuesday night at PlaywrightsHorizons. Over late afternoon martinis, four women representing three generations dive into a freewheelingconversation about how women’s lives have and have not changed since the 1970s.

The image of women rapping away about gender roles may hark back to that seemingly distant era, but the rapitself is rich in new perspectives. Consider this unlikely phenomenon: The ideas of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist scold of the “me” decade, are given about as much airtime as those of Betty Freidan, one of themovement’s heroines.

And guess what? Defending Ms. Schlafly from dismissive scorn is the fiery feminist academic.

“Look, Schlafly is very clear that when a man and woman come together, the man must lead, and the womanmust follow,” she says. “Now, yes, that’s an offensive notion when you put it out there as a rule. But mymiddle-aged observation is that in a relationship between two people, you can’t both go first.”

This unlikely iconoclast, Catherine Croll (Amy Brenneman, of television’s “Private Practice” and “JudgingAmy”), has never been one to go second. The author of two books and a television pundit when the occasionrequires, she has forged a high-profile career that has managed to transcend academia. So why does she feelstranded and unfulfilled as she slides toward her middle 40s? The answer, she freely admits, is that she isbeginning to regret not having married and had children.

The marriage versus career debate faced by women has been a subject of popular debate since feminism firstbecame a cultural force. Ms. Gionfriddo, the author of the scintillating Pulitzer Prize finalist “Becky Shaw,”acknowledged in an article for The New York Times that “Rapture, Blister, Burn” can be viewed as anunwitting homage to “The Heidi Chronicles,” Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which exploredthe complexities of an accomplished woman’s life with humor and trenchancy back in 1988.

Almost a quarter-century and many a pop-lit best seller later, you might wonder what fresh insights are to befound by tilling such well-covered ground. But as Ms. Gionfriddo’s play illustrates, each generation of womenhas to struggle with evolving attitudes toward marriage, not to mention the seemingly unchanging verities ofthe male psyche.

Catherine has returned to her hometown to take care of her mother, Alice (the wonderful Beth Dixon, asbracingly dry as the martinis she mixes). Alice has recently had a heart attack, but Catherine’s arrival has asmuch to do with feeling adrift and unsatisfied — in search of a stable home — as it does with her mother’sillness.

Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - The New York Times

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Catherine soon finds herself keeping company with a man she once loved, who is also the only man she hasever loved. A detour onto the road not taken suddenly seems a tantalizing possibility.

Don Harper (the excellent Lee Tergesen), a fellow graduate student, was Catherine’s boyfriend when she wentoff to London to pursue a promising academic opportunity. By the time she came back, he had taken up withher best friend, Gwen (Kellie Overbey). Now they have two children and seem at first blush to represent theideal that Catherine never had another serious chance to consider.

But it doesn’t take too much digging to uncover the more complicated truth. Catherine, a media studiesprofessor, has taken a position at the college where Don is a dean. When she decides to start a summersession, Gwen becomes one of her students — one of only two, as it turns out, the other being (somewhatcontrivedly) the Harpers’ baby sitter, the 21-year-old pre-med dropout Avery (Virginia Kull).

At their first class, Gwen opens up about the problems in her marriage, which range from a grinding lack offunds to Don’s addictions to pot and pornography. She has often pondered whether she made the right choicein giving up her own academic ambitions. Catherine represents, to her, another kind of tantalizing ideal.

Avery, full of the brash self-confidence of youth, has entirely different ideas about the way men and womeninteract. (She and her boyfriend are “hooking up exclusively,” she corrects Gwen, not “exclusively hookingup.”) To Avery neither Catherine’s nor Gwen’s life seems a valuable model. As she puts it, “You either have acareer and wind up lonely and sad, or you have a family and wind up lonely and sad?”

Ms. Gionfriddo’s play does not really present Gwen and Catherine’s lives as two sides of the same tarnished,useless coin. What’s exciting about her writing here is the multiplicity of the ideas it engages. Heady withsharp-witted dialogue about the particularities of women’s experience (there’s a joke about pornography andGoogle maps — believe it or not — that’s worth the ticket price alone), “Rapture” more largely illuminates howhard it can be to forge both a satisfying career and a fulfilling personal life in an era that seems to demandsuperhuman achievement from everyone.

Under the finely honed direction of Peter DuBois, the cast brings Ms. Gionfriddo’s characters to fully felt life.Ms. Brenneman exudes a brisk intelligence — and a telegenic beauty — that makes her Catherine whollycredible as a sort of Naomi Wolf-Camille Paglia mash-up. But her sensitively drawn performance also revealsthe emotional yearning at the character’s core.

Ms. Overbey has the soft features of a gamboling beauty from a Fragonard painting, but her Gwen evinces afirm will that leads her to make a provocative suggestion to Catherine about how both of them could reordertheir lives to the greater satisfaction of all. And Ms. Kull is wonderful as the outspoken Avery, who doesn’t shyfrom speaking her mind about just how and why her elders have screwed up their lives.

But eventually even Avery’s armor of self-assurance about how to get what she wants out of life — and out ofthose ornery things called men — has been dented by disappointment. Still, she salvages a modicum ofoptimism about her future from, of all things, an academic consideration of the meanings of slasher movies.

“O.K., maybe the world has changed,” she says. “That guy who comes in and saves the girl in the end? Hemight not be coming. But the girl is still going to be O.K.”

The surviving-the-psycho metaphor may not be a particularly heartwarming one, but as the somewhat arcane

Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - The New York Times

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title of Ms. Gionfriddo’s play suggests (it’s a song lyric from the rock band Hole), a well-lived life today stillmeans negotiating a fair amount of pain and frustration in search of that elusive goal, happiness.

Rapture, Blister, Burn

By Gina Gionfriddo; directed by Peter DuBois; sets by Alexander Dodge; costumes by Mimi O’Donnell; lightingby Jeff Croiter; sound by M. L. Dogg; production manager, Christopher Boll; production stage manager, LisaAnn Chernoff. Presented by Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director; Leslie Marcus, managingdirector; Carol Fishman, general manager. At Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200, ticketcentral.com. Through June 24. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Amy Brenneman (Catherine), Beth Dixon (Alice), Virginia Kull (Avery), Kellie Overbey (Gwen) and LeeTergesen (Don).