Playwright Horizons: more cast announced for new season

Playwrights Horizons (PH) has announced additional casting for its 2010/2011 40th Anniversary Season.

Lily Rabe ('The American Plan,' 'Crimes of the Heart,' 'Steel Magnolias') will headline the World Premiere of Kin, a new play by Bathsheba Doran ('Living Room in Africa,' her adaptation of 'Great Expectations' at The Lucille Lortel). Directed by Obie Award winner Sam Gold (Annie Baker's 'Circle Mirror Transformation' at Playwrights Horizons and 'The Aliens' at Rattlestick), performances will take place in spring 2011.

In Kin, 'Anna' (Ms. Rabe), a Texan Ivy League poetry scholar, and 'Sean,' an Irish personal trainer, hardly seem destined for one another. But as their web of disparate family and friends crosses great distances - both psychologically and geographically - an unlikely new family is forged.

In other casting news, Zachary Booth ('Prayer for My Enemy' at PH, 'Damages' and 'Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist'), Natalia Payne ('New Jerusalem' at CSC), Stephen Payne ('Superior Donuts' and 'August: Osage County' on Broadway; 'Me, Myself & I' at The McCarter) and Preston Sadleir (Off-Broadway debut) complete the cast of the New York premiere of Edward Albee's Me, Myself & I, a new play by the three-time Pulitzer Prize and three-time Tony Award winner ('A Delicate Balance,' 'Seascape,' 'Three Tall Women,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'and 'The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?').

The four will join the previously-announced Tony Award winner Elizabeth Ashley ('Take Her, She's Mine') and three-time Tony Award nominee Brian Murray ('The Crucible,' 'The Little Foxes' and 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.').

Directed by Tony Award nominee, Obie Award winner Emily Mann ('Miss Witherspoon' at Playwrights Horizons, 'Having Our Say'), Me, Myself & I was originally presented at McCarter Theatre in January 2008. Mr. Murray will reprise his performance from the McCarter production.

Edward Albee's Me, Myself & I will open Playwrights Horizons' 40th Anniversary Season. The play opens on 12 Sep 2010, following previews from 24 Aug and runs through to 31 Oct 2010.

In Me, Myself & I, Mother (Ashley) can't tell her identical twins apart. But when Otto (Booth) announces his brother ( Sadleir) doesn't exist, the household descends into chaos.

Me, Myself & I had its World Premiere at McCarter Theatre, opening on 18 Jan 2008 and playing a limited engagement through to 17 Feb 2008. Ben Brantley in The New York Times hailed the play as, "A laugh-out-loud farce in which the meanings of everyday words split and multiply like amoebas on steroids."

Albee will be making his Playwrights Horizons debut with this production. Mann previously worked with Playwrights Horizons directing 'Miss Witherspoon' (2005). Both Ashley and Murray are also returning to the theater company, where she appeared in 'When She Danced' (1990) and he appeared in 'The Butterfly Collection' (2000) and 'Mud, River, Stone' (1997). Booth previously appeared at Playwrights Horizons in 'Prayer for My Enemy' (2009).

Additional casting for the 2010/2011 Season will be announced in the coming months.