MTC Gets Cynthia Nixon in Folly and Works by Ayckbourn & Cruz

The Manhattan Theatre Club 2005-2006 season is shaping up. The company will present new productions of Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly, starring Cynthia Nixon, and Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre. Nilo Cruz's Beauty of the Father, originally announced for this season, will play off-Broadway next season. It will join the previously reported world premiere of David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole as part of MTC's lineup at City Center.

Nixon was originally supposed to star in a staging of Talley's Folly off-Broadway as part of the Signature Theatre's Lanford Wilson season but withdrew from the production which was eventually canceled because she was scheduled to give birth a few weeks before performances began. The play, which takes place in 1944 in a small town in Missouri, centers on outsider Matt Friedman and his relationship with the reluctant Sally Talley Nixon. Doug Hughes currently represented on Broadway by MTC's Doubt will helm the production.

Absurd Person Singular is a comedy of social class and marriage on the rocks featuring three couples, three kitchens and three successive Christmas Eves. MTC Artistic Director Lynne Meadow will direct.

Beauty of the Father, directed by Michael Greif, centers on a young woman who travels to Spain to visit her estranged father and quickly becomes immersed in his vibrant, artistic world. But will a charming Moroccan suitor stand in the way of their reconciliation?

MTC is still in the midst of its 2004-2005 season. Moonlight and Magnolias is currently running at City Center Stage I, A Picasso is about to begin performances at City Center Stage II and After the Night and the Music starts at the Biltmore Theatre on April 28.