Norbert Leo Butz to Join Elizabeth Marvel in Fifty Words at MCC

Tony Award winner Norbert Leo Butz will join recent Top Girls star Elizabeth Marvel in MCC Theater's upcoming world premiere of playwright Michael Weller's Fifty Words, set to begin performances September 10 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. The two-character show, helmed by Austin Pendleton, will open September 28, concluding its limited run on October 25.

In Fifty Words, something has gone very wrong behind the idyllic façade of Jan Marvel and Adam's Butz brownstone. At 9:10PM they're reveling in the freedom of having waved off their young son, Greg, to a neighborhood sleepover. By 9:15 they're both in tears. By 9:25, things are way past tears. Alternately funny and frightening, Fifty Words is an expansive look at modern marriage as seen through the looking glass of one couple's long night's journey into day.

Butz most recently starred in the Broadway production of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?. His numerous Broadway credits include Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, for which he won a Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award, as well as Wicked, Cabaret, Though Shalt Not and Rent. Off-Broadway credits include Buicks and the celebrated Jason Robert Brown musical The Last Five Years. Butz recently appeared in the film Dan in Real Life.

Fifty Words opens the season at MCC, and will be followed by Neil LaBute's The Break of Noon January 14 to February 28, 2009 and Stephin Merritt and David Greenspan's new musical Coraline May 6 to June 20, 2009.