MTC Adds David Greig's The American Pilot to Off-Broadway Season

Manhattan Theatre Club has added David Greig's The American Pilot to its 2006-2007 season lineup. The show will bow off-Broadway at City Center in the fall.

The American Pilot centers on what happens when an American pilot crash-lands in a rural village in a war-torn country. Should the villagers in the region help him, murder him or use him as a pawn in a dangerous game with the enemy?

The American Pilot had a Royal Shakespeare Company run last year April 27, 2005 to July 9, 2005 as part of the company's presentation of new work at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote of that mounting: "Greig's calculated geographical imprecision is sometimes frustrating. And his plot is occasionally driven by allegorical necessity rather than probability... But what Greig captures excellently is the idea of the world as a shrinking global village dominated by US values… The play's format is that of a Brechtian lehrstück or teaching piece; but Greig goes beyond simplistic propaganda to explore both America's cultural colonialism and its residual mystique."

The American Pilot joins an MTC off-Broadway slate that already included Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only, David Harrower's Blackbird and Charles Busch's Our Leading Lady.