Shirley Knight to Star in Off-B'way's Cycling Past the Matterhorn in September

Shirley Knight will star in Deborah Grimberg's Cycling Past the Matterhorn off-Broadway. The show, directed by Eleanor Holdridge, will begin a 12-week limited engagement at the Clurman Theatre in the Theatre Row complex on September 20.

Set in contemporary London, Cycling Past the Matterhorn is a comedy about a mother and daughter at a crossroads. Amy is a young sidewalk psychic with mediocre abilities who earns her modest living forecasting the troubled lives of the British public. Amy's eccentric mother, Esther Knight, has recently been left by her husband and has just discovered she is slowly going blind. Amy, fearing being stuck as Esther's caretaker, considers marrying her American boyfriend to escape the predicament, while Esther decides to forge ahead with her life and joins a cycling excursion in Switzerland to see the mountains while she still can.

Knight won a Tony Award for her performance in Kennedy's Children and was also nominated for the prestigious award for her work in The Young Man From Atlanta. Other Broadway credits include Three Sisters, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Watering Place. She last appeared on the New York stage off-Broadway in 2002's Necessary Targets. Knight was nominated for Academy Awards for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Sweet Bird of Youth. She will soon be seen on the small screen as Bree's mother-in-law in the hit series Desperate Housewives.

Cycling Past the Matterhorn, which will also feature Brenda Wehle and Nina Jacques, is scheduled to officially open on September 29.