Peter Weller, Kristine Nielsen Join Playwrights Horizons Season

Stage veteran Peter Weller, star of TV's 24 and the popular Robocop films, will play Frank Lloyd Wright in the New York premiere of Richard Nelson's Frank's Home at Playwrights Horizons early next year. Harris Yulin co-stars as Wright's mentor, architect Louis Sullivan. Previews begin January 17 at the off-Broadway company's Mainstage Theater, directed by Robert Falls.

In other Playwrights Horizons casting news, Kristine Nielsen joins the previously announced Sigourney Weaver in the world premiere of A.R. Gurney's Crazy Mary, directed by Weaver's husband, Jim Simpson. Previews begin May 4, 2007, at the Mainstage Theater.

Finally, Reg E. Cathey and Andre Holland have been announced as the stars of Blue Door, a new play by Tanya Barfield to be directed by Leigh Silverman. Previews begin September 28 at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater, and opening night is scheduled for October 10.

In Frank's Home, architect Frank Lloyd Wright has recently left Chicago for California in the summer of 1923, determined to embrace Hollywood's youthful zest and mend broken relationships with his adult children. Having recently completed Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, Wright is poised to settle down but his family still holds deep-seated resentments.

Weller began his career in the New York theater, with credits that include David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, David Mamet's The Woods and Lanford Wilson's Serenading Louie. Most recently, he appeared in The Exonerated and on television as terrorist collaborator Christopher Henderson on 24.

Yulin has appeared at Playwrights Horizons in Fran's Bed and Arts & Leisure. His Broadway credits include Hedda Gabler, The Price, The Diary of Anne Frank and A Lesson From Aloes.

In the title role of Crazy Mary, Nielsen will play the long-lost cousin of Lydia Weaver, the scion of a wealthy clan in Buffalo, NY. In an attempt to account for the family inheritance, Lydia and her college-age son visit Mary, who is living in an asylum for the wealthy insane and has barely spoken for years.

Nielsen starred in Playwrights Horizons' productions of Miss Witherspoon and Betty's Summer Vacation, both by Christopher Durang. Broadway credits include A Streetcar Named Desire, The Green Bird, Jackie: An American Life and The Iceman Cometh.

Blue Door is described as a tour-de-force for two actors about the black American male experience. When a prominent African-American mathematician in crisis begins to lose his grip on reality, the ghosts of his ancestors shatter the silence of an insomnia-filled night.

Cathey has worked often at the Public Theater; his off-Broadway credits include Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, White Chocolate and Crowbar. On television, he has played Warden Querns on Oz and Commander Morag in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Holland is a 2006 graduate of the NYU Graduate Acting Program and appeared in As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park.