Beyond Glory, a solo show about eight Medal of Honor winners written by and starring Stephen Lang, will replace Brian Friel's The Home Place on the summer schedule at the Roundabout Theatre Company. Lang's play will begin previews at the off-Broadway Laura Pels Theatre on May 25 and open on June 21, directed by Robert Falls Talk Radio, Death of a Salesman. The Friel play, written in 2004, "will be rescheduled at a time when we can find the right cast," according to a statement from Roundabout artistic director Todd Haimes.
Lang, who based his show on Larry Smith's 2002 book Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Heroes in Their Own Words, presents the stories of eight veterans who earned the Medal of Honor in World War II, Korea or Vietnam. The play premiered in Arlington, Virginia, in 2004, and toured military installations the following year backed by the NEA and the Department of Defense. Beyond Glory then played at Chicago's Goodman Theater, where Falls is the artistic director, in the fall of 2005.
Lang is currently appearing in Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention at California's La Jolla Playhouse, which has attracted attention as a possible Broadway transfer to be backed by Stephen Spielberg. Lang's most recent New York credit, the Manhattan Theatre Club's 2006 off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley's Defiance, also had a military theme, and he played Lt. Col. Nathan Jessup in the 1989 Broadway production of Sorkin's A Few Good Men. Other Broadway credits include Wait Until Dark, the title role in Roundabout's 1992 mounting of Hamlet, The Speed of Darkness and the 1984 production of Death of a Salesman as Happy opposite Dustin Hoffman, John Malkovich and Kate Reid.
The design team for Beyond Glory includes Tony Cisek sets, David Woolard costumes, Dan Covey lights Cecil Averett sound, Robert Kessler original music and John Boesche projections.
