Playwrights Horizons Announces Additional Play, Casting for 2009-2010

Playwrights Horizons will present the world premiere of Kia Corthron’s A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick as the sixth and final production of the 2009-2010 season. Directed by Chay Yew, the play will be presented at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in a co-production with The Play Company and the Culture Project. Dates and casting have not been announced.

Corthron’s play centers on an African preacher-in-training taken in by a family in the American South who finds his calling in the broken lives around him. The town’s water supply is depleted by drought, a young orphan is starved for guidance, and a mother and daughter are haunted by tragedy, but the relentlessly upbeat preacher determines to battle—however he can—the personal and political forces that threaten the ecology of his new home.

In addition, Playwrights Horizons announced that Eisa Davis (Passing Strange), Glenn Fitzgerald (Lobby Hero) and Louis Cancelmi (The Singing Forest) will join previously announced star Parker Posey in the world premiere of Melissa James Gibson’s This, directed by Daniel Aukin.

Finally, Reed Birney (The Savannah Disputation), Tony nominee Peter Friedman (Ragtime, The Heidi Chronicles) and Deirdre O’Connell (Manic Flight Reaction) will join the company’s previously announced world premiere of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, directed by Sam Gold.