Love and Mercy, a New Play by Jon Robin Baitz, Eyes Broadway Debut

Love and Mercy, a new play by Jon Robin Baitz, is headed for Broadway during the 2010-2011 season. Producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel (Race, August: Osage County) are aiming for an opening in late fall or early winter. No casting or creative team members have been announced.

The play, which takes place over the course of a Christmas Eve in Palm Springs, centers on a one-time matinee idol turned politician, his screenwriter wife and their novelist daughter. Love and Mercy explores the limits of parental love and filial duty, our myth-making culture and the claim we have on our own biography when it involves the invasion of privacy of others.

Although Baitz has collected a stack of admiring reviews for plays such as The Substance of Fire, The Film Society, The End of the Day, Three Hotels, Ten Unknowns and Pulitzer Prize finalist A Fair Country, he has never been produced on Broadway. His work was most recently seen on the New York stage in 2005 in the off-Broadawy production of The Paris Letter. Baitz created the ABC series Brothers & Sisters.

In addition to Love and Mercy, The New York Times reports that Baitz is working on a play based on the life of movie producer Robert Evans. Written with Evans' cooperation (and based on his memoirs The Kid Stays in the Picture and an unpublished follow-up, The Fat Lady Sings), the Evans bio will be directed by Richard Eyre and produced by John N. Hart Jr.