Sarah Ruhl, Blair Brown & More Onboard for Playwrights Horizons 2007-08 Season

Starting previews in August in the Mainstage Theater is the world premiere of Kate Fodor's new play, 100 Saints You Should Know, directed by Tony nominee Ethan McSweeny. It tells the story of Theresa, a woman who, while cleaning the rectory of a local parish to support her unruly teenage daughter, gets wrapped up in the mysterious departure of a priest from the church. One eventful night joins them, forcing a reckoning with the broken memories and shaken faith that divides them - and the discovery of a shared, tenuous common ground.

Tony-winning actress and Playwrights Horizons alum Blair Brown, recently of Lincoln Center's The Clean House, will direct the world premiere production of Sarah Treem's A Feminine Ending. Having recently graduated from a major conservatory, and with a rocker boyfriend on the brink of stardom, aspiring composer Amanda Blue's "extraordinary life" seems to be all mapped out. But when she's called home to answer her mother's distress call about a marital crisis, Amanda's grand plan starts to unravel. A Feminine Ending is a bittersweet new play about dreams deferred, loves lost, and learning to trust a woman's voice in a man's world. Previews begin in September at Playwrights' smaller Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

Next in the Mainstage Theater in November is a new play being billed as, "a time-jumping pop fairy tale about the dreams and disasters behind one transcendent song." Doris to Darlene: A Cautionary Valentine is Jordan Harrison's new play set in the candy-colored 1960s, where a biracial schoolgirl named Doris is being molded into pop star Darlene by a whiz-kid record producer. Rewind to the candy-colored 1860s, where Richard Wagner is writing the melody that will become Darlene's hit song and then fast-forward to the not-so-candy-colored present, where a teenager obsesses over Darlene's music - and his music teacher, creating a fascinating look at three very different decades. Obie Award winner Les Waters directs.

A new play titled Dead Man's Cell Phone has been commissioned by Playwrights from Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl The Clean House to play in the Mainstage in the Winter/Spring of 2008. The imaginative new comedy is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technology-obsessed world. In it, Gordon is dead, but his cell phone lives on. When Jean, an empathetic museum worker, answers his ringing phone beside her in a café, she is soon playing unwitting comforter and confessor to the man's grieving friends and family. Before she knows it, Jean's ensnarled in the underbelly of the dead man's bizarre life. Exact run dates are to be announced.

Later in the Spring of '08 at the Peter Jay Sharp will be the New York premiere of playwright Adam Bock's new play, The Drunken City. This production reunites Bock with director Trip Cullman, who also directed his play, Swimming in the Shallows for the off-Broadway stage. In Bock's unique theatrical take on the mystique of marriage and the ever-shifting nature of love and identity in a city that never sleeps, three twenty-something brides-to-be go on a bar crawl, only to find their lives going topsy-turvy when one of them suddenly begins to question her future after a chance encounter with a recently jilted handsome stranger.

Details for a sixth production and well as casting information for the five announced shows are forthcoming.