Tony Winner Denis O'Hare to Premiere My Iliad at Portland Center Stage

Tony-winning actor Denis O'Hare will premiere An Iliad, his one-man version of Homer's The Iliad, as part of the just-announced 2010-2011 Portland Center Stage season. It will play in the Ellyn Bye Studio of the Portland, Oregon theater from September 28 to November 21, 2010.

O'Hare developed An Iliad at the Sundance Theatre Institute with Lisa Peterson. In the show, the theater promises, O'Hare makes "the western world’s oldest extant work of literature not only intelligible, but immediate, relevant and eerily fascinating, like a bar room raconteur telling literally the oldest story in the book and making you believe it is being told for the first time." A director hasn't been announced for An Iliad.

O'Hare won just about every theatrical award for his performance as a gay baseball fan in the Richard Greenberg play Take Me Out, including the Tony Award and the Broadway.com Audience Award for Favorite Featured Actor in a Broadway Play. He also received a Tony nomination for Assassins and also appeared on Broadway in Cabaret and Sweet Charity. O'Hare is a regular on the big screen, appearing in many films including 21 Grams, Garden State, Half Nelson, Charlie Wilsoin's War, Michael Clayton, A Mighty Heart, Milk, Changeling, Baby Mama, The Proposal, Duplicity and Edge of Darkness. Seen in TV shows including Brothers and Sisters and The Good Wife, O'Hare is set to appear on the hit HBO series True Blood later this year as Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi.

Main stage productions announced for the Portland theater's 22nd season are the Tony-winning musical Sunset Boulevard (September 14 to October 17, 2010), a stage version of the classic 1980s holiday film A Christmas Story (November 21 to December 26, 2010), Constance Congdon's adaptation of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid (January 11 to February 6, 2011), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (February 22 to March 20, 2011), the new play Opus by Michael Hollinger (April 12 to May 8, 2011) and the Janis Joplin rock musical Love, Janis (May 24 to June 26, 2011).

Also playing in the Ellyn Bye Studio are The Santaland Diaries, Futura by Jordan Harrison and Love/Stories (or, But You'll Get Used to It) by Itamar Moses.