Tony Winner Bartlett Sher to Helm Blood and Gifts at Lincoln Center

Blood and Gifts, a new play by J.T. Rogers, will bow at off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre this fall, directed by Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher. Previews will begin October 27, 2011, and opening night is set for November 21. Casting and a design team for the project will be announced at a later date.

Commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater and presented last fall at London's National Theatre, Blood and Gifts tells the story of the secret spy war behind the official Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. Spanning a decade and playing out in Washington D.C., Pakistan and Afghanistan, the play follows CIA operative Jim Warnock as he struggles to stop the Soviet Army's destruction of Afghanistan and tells the story of the unknown men who shaped one of the greatest historical events of recent history.

Rogers’ plays include Madagascar, White People, Murmuring in a Dead Tongue, The Overwhelming and Seeing the Elephant, which was nominated for the Kesselring Prize for Best New American Play. An earlier version of Blood and Gifts was presented as part of a cycle of 11 plays about Afghanistan titled The Great Game: Afghanistan at the Tricycle Theatre in London.

Sher is Resident Director at Lincoln Center Theater and has directed the LCT productions of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Awake and Sing!, The Light in the Piazza and South Pacific, for which he won a Tony Award. He is the former artistic director of Seattle’s Intiman Theater, and his other New York credits include productions at Playwrights Horizons and Theatre for a New Audience.