Tony Winners Denis O’Hare and Stephen Spinella Announced for New York Theatre Workshop Season

New York Theater Workshop has announced two new shows in their 2011-2012 season: Lameece Issaq’s Food and Fadwa and An Iliad, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, written by Tony-winning actor Denis O’Hare and director Lisa Peterson.

Shana Gold will direct Food and Fadwa, which centers on a Palestinian family preparing for a family wedding in the West Bank. Playwright Issaq is the artistic director of Noor Theater, the workshop’s company-in-residence and co-producer. Issaq conceived and developed the piece with Jacob Kader.

An Iliad is a modern retelling of Homer’s epic created by Peterson and O’Hare using a translation of the work by Robert Fagles. Peterson will direct the solo show, which “spins the tale of gods and goddesses, undying love, and endless battles told through an original, contemporary, and immediate voice.” Tony Award winners O’Hare (Take Me Out) and Stephen Spinella (Angels in America) will perform the piece on alternating nights.

These two projects will follow the previously announced The Select – The Sun Also Rises, a piece made up of dialogue and prose culled from Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel about American expatriates in France and Spain in the wake of World War I. The Select is a creation of the acclaimed Elevator Repair Service whose theater epic Gatz, a word-for-word recreation of The Great Gatsby, enjoyed a wildly successful run at the Public Theater in fall 2010.

A fourth production for the season will be announced in the coming weeks. No performance dates or additional casting information have yet been released.