PublicPerspective is the PittsburghPublicTheater'S newslettertorsubscribers andfriends. The Lay Of The Land At The Public Is ''Lots Of Laughs!'' (Pittsburgh Press)
May. June 1991
Tony Award Winner Mary Alice Stars In John Henry Redwood's A Sunbeam
Lee Grant, director of The Lay Of The Land, with (left) actors Greg Mullavey and Lisa Richards and playwright Mel Shapiro.
Marital bliss collides hilariously with mid• die age In long time Pittsburgher Mel Shapiro's new comedy The Lay Of The Land, 1990 winner of the Kesselring Prize for Playwriting, at the Public Theater now through May 19. No stranger to playwriting. Shapiro, who is best known to Public fans as the director of Hay Fever, Orphans, Eleanor, and Speed-The-Plow, won a 1985 Los Angeles Drama-Logue Award for his play The Price Of Admission and a Tony Award with John Gu are for the libretto of the 1972 Broadway ~it musical Two Gentleme!" of Verona. The world premiere of The Lay Of The Land brought Oscar and two-time Emmywinning actress Lee Grant to Pittsburgh to direct stage and television veterans Greg Mullavey and Lisa Richards in the roles of troubled middle-aged couple Harvey and M.J. Dankworth. In the offices of their respective psychiatrists, who are never seen, Harvey and M.J. work through a bizarre series of events that are triggered when Harvey, a pre-Soviet literature professor, enters an absurdly obsessive affair with one of his students. His obsession revives the careless youth in him, endangering not only his marriage but his chances attenure. Meanwhile, M .J., a documentary filmmaker !who hasn't been able to complete a film in ]years, suffers from a psychosomatic rash
that worsens with her suspicions that Harvey is cheating on her. Her determination to discover the truth leads her to hire private eye Carmine Ficcone, the kind of sexy Italian who " seduces the door knob when he opens a door." Both obsession and suspicion are taken to comical extremes as husband and wife grapple to overcome the crisis and begin again. Lay Of The Land director Lee Grant was last in Pittsburgh when she directed the TV movie No Place Like Home starring Jeff Daniels and Christine Lahti, which won the Silver Prize at the 1989 Cannes International Television Festival. An accomplished actress whose credits include an Oscar for Shampoo and an Emmy for Peyton Place, Grant has also established herself as a notable stage and film director. Her formidable directing credits include Nobody's Childfor CBS, which starred Marlo Thomas and won Grant the Directors Guild Award, and Down And Out In America for HBO which won the 1987 Oscar tor Best Documentary Feature. For the theater, Grant staged Vaclav Havel's A Private View at the New York Shakespeare Festival, winning a New York Drama Critics Circle Award nomination for Best Director. Greg Mullavey, who stars as the affaircrazed Harvey, is widely remembered as Tom Hartman in the television series Mary Continued on page 2
Mary Alice, shown here with James Earl Jones in her 1987 Tony Award-winning performance in Broadway's Fences, will star at the Public.
John Henry Red"tood, loved by Pittsburgh audiences for his portrayal of Troy in August Wilson's Fences and Seth in Joe Turner's Come And Gone, returns to the Public in the role of playwright for the world premiere of his award-winning drama, A Sunbeam, May 30 through July 7. A Sunbeam will star film, stage and television vet• eran Mary Alice, who won the 1987 Best Featured Actress Tony and Drama Desk Awards for her portrayal of Rose in the Broadway Fences. Joining Redwood and Mary Alice are director Claude Purdy, set designer Jim Sandefur and lighting designer Phil Monat - the same team that put together the smash hit productions of Fences and Joe Turner's Come And Gone and this season's The Night Of The Iguana. A Sunbeam is the poignant story of Sol Gilchrist, a 39-year old mentally handicapped black man who knows only the unflinching love of his mother Celia and the protective circle with which she has tried to surround him. Sol, institutionalized for most of his life, lives for his cigar box of photographs and his mother's Wednesday and
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Sunday visits. As he grows older, his parents, Celia in particular, are faced with a nearly insurmountable problem - who will be responsible for this enormous, gentle manchild when his parents can no longer watch over him? Mary Alice portrays Celia, the devoted mother who has never given up hoping that someday, some way, Sol can be healed. Mary Alice broke ground as the matriarch of the first black family featured in a daytime drama, NBC's Another World. (The series' head writer was Corinne Jacker, who adapted both the 1989 production of Hedda Gabler and next season's Three Sisters for the Public.) Mary Alice's stage credits include playing Rose opposite James Earl Jones in the Broadway production of Fences, and the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Richard Ill. She appeared in the Academy Award-nominee Awakenings with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams. The Bonfire Of The Vanities with Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis, and the critically acclaimed To Sleep With Anger with Danny Glover. Continued on page 2