Valerie Harper Headlines MY MOTHER, MY SISTER & ME Reading, 5/14

The Peccadillo Theater Company will present a special industry reading of Sherri Heller's new comedy MY MOTHER, MY SISTER & ME starring Valerie Harper on Monday, May 14^th at 7 pm at the DR2 Theatre (103 East 15^th Street). The presentation will be directed by OBIE Award winner, Dan Wackerman. A full cast announcement will be forthcoming. 

MY MOTHER, MY SISTER & ME focuses on the coming of age of a young Holly Abrams and her middle-class Jewish family during the summer of 1969. This bright new comedy follows the hopes and dreams of the Abrams family amid the changing cultural and social landscape of the Bronx. MY MOTHER, MY SISTER & ME is the first installment of Heller's trilogy of plays that visits the Abrams family from 1969-1980. 

Four time Emmy winner Valerie Harper ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Rhoda"), starred on Broadway in Matthew Lombardo's Looped and Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, and in the national tour of William Gibson's Golda's Balcony, winner of the 2006 Touring Broadway Award. Other Broadway credits include Paul Sills' Story Theatre, Carl Reiner's Something Different, Subways Are for Sleeping, Wildcat, Take Me Along, Destry Rides Again and Li'l Abner. Off-Broadway, she starred in Death Defying Acts by Elaine May and Woody Allen and All Under Heaven, a one-woman play which she co-wrote based on the life and work of Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck. On TV, she achieved worldwide acclaim playing Rhoda Morgenstern on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda," earning four Emmys, a Golden Globe, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year and the Hollywood Women's Press Club Golden Apple Award. She starred on the NBC series "Valerie," as well as on CBS' "The Office," and "City," and in the feature films Freebie and the Bean, Neil Simon's Chapter Two, Blame It on Rio and The Last Married Couple in America. Valerie's numerous TV guest starring credits include "The Simpsons" and "Drop Dead Diva" and she is currently writing a memoir for Simon & Schuster. 

Sherri Heller is a produced playwright, journalist and former CBS executive. She began her playwriting career in Children's Theater at Gateway Playhouse. She was a finalist for the Lucille Ball Festival of Short Comic Plays and contributing playwright for Olympia Dukakis' resident comedy troupe at the Whole Theater, Style Without Substance and for 12 Miles West's Theatre Café Series. Last Thursday, Cruise Control, Home of the Brave, Double Vision and Grand Central…or a Day in the Life of a Terminal were produced Off-Off-Broadway and featured in top festivals and special events venues nationwide. Heller is a playwright member of the Dramatists Guild and a graduate of Syracuse University.

Founded in 1994, The Peccadillo Theater Company is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to the rediscovery of classic American theater, particularly those works which, despite their obvious literary and theatrical value, are not regularly revived. In recent years, Peccadillo has broadened its mission to include original plays and musicals that share some of the virtues of classic American theater such as period style, well-defined characters and strong plotting. Such was the case with The Talk of the Town, an original musical about the legendary wits of the Algonquin Roundtable, several of whose plays Peccadillo has produced. AndZero Hour, about the actor/comedian Zero Mostel, whose appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee was just as explosive as his stage performances. Peccadillo's most recent productions were its critically acclaimed revivals of Kaufman & Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner and the George Abbott/Arthur Schwartz/Dorothy Fields musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Outer Critics Circle nominee Best Musical Revival). 

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