Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory to Reunite for Two Plays at the Public Theater

Longtime collaborators Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, best known for their work in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, will team up to present two of Shawn’s plays at the Public Theater in 2013 in co-productions with the Theater for a New Audience. Both plays, a revival of The Designated Mourner and the American premiere of Grasses of a Thousand Colors, will both star Shawn and be directed by Gregory. The Public Theater presented Shawn’s first play in New York, Our Late Night, in 1975, directed by Gregory. 

The Designated Mourner is a monologue-triptych in which three artist-intellectuals describe their experiences as their once-liberal country sinks into totalitarianism. It will run from June 21 through August 25, 2013, at the Public’s Shiva Theater. The cast will feature Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg and Larry Pine, all of whom appeared in the original New York production in 2000.

Grasses of a Thousand Colors touches on almost every imaginable form of sexual expression while spinning a dystopian fantasy about ecological disaster. Ben, the play’s central character, is a doctor who believes he has solved world hunger when he figures out how to rejigger the metabolisms of animals to tolerate eating their own kind. It will run from October 8 through November 10, 2013, starring Shawn, Emily McDonnell and Jennifer Tilly, reprising their roles from the play’s 2009 London premiere.