Southern Comfort: comedy by Elisabeth Gray

Elizabeth Gray will star in her one-woman comedy show Southern Discomfort, directed by Daniel Zimbler, playing on Monday evenings at the SoHo Playhouse from 25 Mar - 27 May 2013.

Written in the Southern Gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, Elisabeth Gray's Southern Discomfort is described as a comedic exploration of loneliness and the drastic measures people take to overcome it.

Gray brings a collection of idiosyncratic characters to life in Southern Discomfort: from a one-armed teenage boy selling Civil War reenactment weaponry at his family's gun stall, to a former beauty queen in a plastic surgeon's office obsessed with facial symmetry, to a forlorn tow truck driver in love with an African-American-Mormon stripper. The men and women Miss Gray portrays in the show are all based on real, true Southerners she has met and known in her years growing up in the South.

Elizabeth Gray said,

Southern Discomfort evolved out of my desire to explore an honest vision of the contemporary South and the bizarre, wondrous people who inhabit it. The challenge and the fun of the project has been to discover compassion for characters who- on the surface, at least- warrant none, who would be overlooked by an outsider as slovenly or boring or materialistic or racist or demented- you name it. As Flannery O'Connor concluded 'For me, anything that is comic is truly tragic and anything that is tragic is truly comic."

Gray is soon to make her Broadway debut in the world premiere of Richard Greenberg's new stage adaptation of Truman Capote's novella 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.' Gray starred in Edward Anthony's solo-play, 'Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath,' which played Off-Broadway at 59E59 from 5 - 31 Oct 2010.