Playwrights Horizons Sets Season; Parker Posey to Star in This

Playwrights Horizons has announced four world premiere productions for its 2009-2010 season, including one starring indie film favorite Parker Posey. A new musical and a sixth production, as well as all casting information and dates for all six shows, will be announced in the coming months. Details for the four plays to be presented are as follows:

The Retributionists by Daniel Goldfarb, directed by Leigh Silverman
The Mainstage Theater season will begin with what’s described as a daring romantic thriller by the author of Modern Orthodox and Adam Baum and the Jew Movie. Set in spring 1946, the play tells the fact-based story of a band of Jewish freedom fighters attempting to avenge a society’s wrongs—if only they can keep from tearing each other apart along the way.

Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker, directed by Sam Gold
The first offering at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater is a comedy about four lost New Englanders enrolled in Marty’s community center drama class. When the quintet experiment with harmless games, hearts are quietly torn apart and tiny wars of epic proportions are waged and won. Baker’s plays include Body Awareness.

This by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Daniel Aukin
Parker Posey Hurlyburly, Fifth of July, plus 50 films including Best in Show and The House of Yes will star in the Mainstage Theater production of a new play described as an unromantic comedy about the joys and disappointments of entering your forties. Everyone’s worried about Jane Posey. Her husband’s been dead a year. Her daughter is ten. Her poetry’s lost its muse. Her married friends are struggling. Her gay friend is lonely. And Jane’s blind date with the French doctor without borders is complicated. Gibson is the author of the award-winning play called [sic].

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, directed by Pam MacKinnon
This Mainstage Theater production, described as a pitch-black comedy by the author of The Pain and the Itch, takes on the issue of gentrification. In 1958, a white family moves out. In 2008, a white family moves in. In the intervening years, change overtakes a neighborhood, along with attitudes, inhabitants, and property values.