TACT announces new season

TACT/The Actors Company Theatre has announced its 2010/2011 Season. The company dedicated to presenting neglected or rarely produced plays of literary merit will present productions of The Memorandum by Vaclav Havel, and Three Men On A Horse by George Abbott and John Cecil Holm at The Beckett Theatre (410 West 42nd Street) on Theatre Row.

The cast and creative team for both productions will be announced at a later date.

Scott Alan Evans, the Co-Artistic Director of TACT, said, "This season we're loaded with comedies - with everything that's going on in the world today, we figure we could all use a good laugh. Both plays are big: big ideas, big laughs and big casts. In Havel's brilliant satire of bureaucracy gone mad, and in Abbott and Holm's daffy get-rich-quick comedy, the desire to somehow take control of a world gone crazy is the overarching need. We think that might be something people can relate to these days."

Opening the season is The Memorandum, one of the best known plays by renowned playwright, former political prisoner and the first president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel.

The Memorandum: When the managing director of an enormous corporation discovers that all office communications are suddenly being written in "Ptydepe," a newly invented and impossibly complicated language, his attempts to get one memo translated lead him through an increasingly ridiculous maze of red tape.

Inspired by the absurdities of life in Eastern Europe under Communism, Havel began writing The Memorandum as early as 1960. Rewritten many times over the next few years, it became the second of Havel's plays produced at Prague's Theatre of the Balustrade, where he was then literary manager.

The play had its American debut in 1968 as part of Joseph Papp's inaugural season at The Public Theatre winning an Obie Award for Best Foreign Play. First produced in London in 1977 (and revived in 1995), The Memorandum has been presented regularly around the world. TACT is staging the first major Off Broadway revival in over 40 years. Directed by TACT Company Member and Associate Producer Jenn Thompson, mytemplate=tp2&method=all&10000001=10000348">The Memorandum opens at Theatre Row's Beckett Theatre on 4 Nov 2010, following previews from 25 Oct and runs through to 4 Dec 2010.

TACT continues its 2010/2011 season with Three Men On A Horse, the Depression era comedy by George Abbott and John Cecil Holm.

Three Men On A Horse: Hen-pecked greeting-card writer, Erwin Trowbridge, has an uncanny ability for predicting the winners of horse races. For Erwin it's just a hobby, but when his extraordinary talent is discovered by a down-and-out pack of gamblers, Erwin suddenly finds himself very far from his safe suburban home in Ozone Heights.

Directed TACT Co-Artistic Director Scott Alan Evans, Three Men On A Horse opens at Theatre Row's Beckett Theatre on 23 Mar 2011, following previews from 15 Feb and runs through to 24 Apr 2011.

Three Men On A Horse premiered at the Playhouse Theatre in Jan 1935 where it remained until Nov 1936. It then transferred to the Fulton Theatre to complete its run of 835 performances. It was revived on Broadway in 1942, 1969 and 1993.

In the spring of 1987, the play was presented at the Royal National Theatre and because it was the first time it was produced in London, it was eligible for nomination for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, which it won.

A 1936 film adaptation was produced and directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starred Frank McHugh, Joan Blondell, Guy Kibbee, and Sam Levene.