Olympia Dukakis, John Pankow & More Set for New Plays at the Public
The seven-member cast of Why Torture in Wrong, and the People Who Love Them will include Amir Arison Queens Boulevard, David Aaron Baker Dead Man’s Cell Phone, A Raisin in the Sun, Kristine Nielsen To Be or Not To Be, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Crazy Mary, and John Pankow Cymbeline, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, TV’s Mad About You.
In the Public’s season premiere announcement, Why Torture Is Wrong is described as the story of a young woman suddenly in crisis: Is her new husband, whom she married when drunk, a terrorist? Or just crazy? Or both? Is her father's hobby of butterfly collecting really a cover for his involvement in a shadow government? Does her mother go to the theater to seek mental escape, or is she insane? Durang hones in on private terrors in this black comedy written for an era of yellow, orange, and red alerts.
Olympia Dukakis will lead a cast of nine in The Singing Forest, described in the Public’s season premiere announcement as an examination of how history collides with the human heart in the long shadow of the Holocaust. The Singing Forest examines the secrets of three generations of a family, traveling in time from today's world of Starbucks, celebrity and therapy to Freud's inner circle in 1930s Vienna and to Paris at the end of World War II.
Dukakis, an Oscar winner for Moonstruck, has appeared on the New York stage in Encores! production of 70, Girls, 70, A Mother, A Daughter and a Gun, Social Security, Rose, Who's Who in Hell, The Aspern Papers, Night of the Iguana, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Curse of the Starving Class, Peer Gynt, Titus Andronicus, Electra, Memorandum, A Man's a Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and A View From the Bridge.