Laurence Fishburne is headed to Broadway to play Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, in a solo show next spring. Thurgood, written by George Stevens Jr., will begin previews at the Booth Theatre on March 30, 2008, and open on April 20, directed by Leonard Foglia. The production is scheduled to run through July 20. Conor McPherson's The Seafarer begins performances at the Booth on October 30 in what is now being characterized as a strictly limited engagement.
Thurgood premiered in 2006 at the Westport Country Playhouse, starring James Earl Jones and directed by Foglia. The play is a biographical portrait of Marshall, which includes his childhood in Baltimore and his service as chief counsel of the NAACP, for which he argued the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case in 1954. Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967 and died in 1993.
Fishburne won a 1992 Tony Award for August Wilson's Two Trains Running and co-starred with Stockard Channing in the Roundabout Theatre Company's 1999 Broadway production of The Lion in Winter. He wrote, directed and co-starred in Riff Raff off-Broadway in 1995, and his off-Broadway credits also include Urban Blight, Loose Ends, Short Eyes and Eden. In Los Angeles, he starred in Afred Uhry's Without Walls at the Mark Taper Forum last year, winning the Best Actor prize at the NAACP Theater Awards, then starred oppoite Angela Bassett in a sold-out run of August Wilson's Fences at the Pasadena Playhouse.
On film, Fishburne received an Oscar nomination for What's Love Got to Do With It?; his many starring credits onscreen include Bobby, Akeelah and the Bee, the three Matrix films, Mission Impossible III, Assault on Precinct 13 and Boyz in the Hood.
