Alfred Uhry to Adapt Marie Brenner's Apples and Oranges for MTC

Pulitzer Prize winner Alfred Uhry will adapt Marie Brenner’s memoir Apples and Oranges for the stage, Manhattan Theater Club has announced. The play will be directed by MTC Artistic Director Lynne Meadow, who orchestrated the project.

"I read Marie Brenner's memoir Apples and Oranges a year ago when I was on sabbatical and loved it,” said Meadow in a statement. “I thought the characters and story would be terrific to see on stage.” The company soon approached Brenner about creating a play based on her autobiographical book, and, with Brenner’s support, selected Uhry as the adaptor.

Apples and Oranges tells the personal story of Brenner, a former investigative journalist for Vanity Fair and “classic New York liberal” who was reunited with a brother, Carl, a conservative apple grower in Washington State, after many years of estrangement. The memoir chronicles’ Brenner’s experience abandoning her big-city lifestyle to care for her brother, who fought her every step of the way.

Uhry previously collaborated with Manhattan Theater Club for the Broadway production of LoveMusik, earning a Drama Desk Award. His other Broadway credits include Here’s Where I Belong, The Robber Bridegroom, Little Johnny Jones, The Last Night of Ballyhoo and Parade, the latter two of which earned him Tony Awards. Urhy is also widely known as a screenwriter, having penned the scripts for Mystic Pizza, Driving Miss Daisy, which earned him an Academy Award, and Rich in Love. Driving Miss Daisy was adapted from Uhry’s original stage production, which debuted at Playwrights Horizons and later won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The scribe was the first American author to have received all three of the country’s most prestigious awards for dramatic writing. 

Information regarding the eventual production of Apples and Oranges will be released in the future.