Mary-Louise Parker, the Tony-winning star of TV's Weeds, will return to the New York stage next year. She will star in Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone at Playwrights Horizons, with performances set to start on February 8, 2008.
Parker will play Jean, an empathetic museum worker who becomes embroiled in the bizarre life of a dead man when she answers his ringing cell phone in a cafe. Dead Man's Cell Phone is the comedic odyssey of a woman forced to confront her assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technology-obsessed world. Directed by two-time Obie Award winner Anne Bogart, the production will also feature previously-announced star Kathleen Chalfant Angels in America, Wit.
Parker is double-nominee for this weekend's Emmy Awards for her leading performances in the acclaimed Showtime series Weeds and the TV-movie The Robber Bride. She previously won an Emmy in 2004 for playing Harper Pitt in the HBO adaptation of the play Angels in America and two Golden Globe Awards, for Angels in America and Weeds. On the stage, she made her Broadway debut in 1990 as the heroine of Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss, for which she received her first Tony Award nomination. She also received a Tony nomination for Reckless in 2005 and won the Tony in 2001 for Proof, a performance which was also honored with a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama League Award, a Lortel Award and an Obie Award. Other notable theater credits include off-Broadway's How I Learned to Drive and a revival of Bus Stop at the Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway. On the big screen, she has been memorably featured in the films Longtime Companion, Grand Canyon, Fried Green Tomatoes, Bullets Over Broadway, Boys on the Side, The Portrait of a Lady, Saved! and the current Romance & Cigarettes and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Dead Man's Cell Phone will feature set and costume design by G.W. Mercier, lighting design by Brian Scott and "soundscape" by Darron L. West.
