A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, Starring Nick Offerman, Opens Tonight in Boston

The Huntington Theatre Company presents its extended world premiere production of A Confederacy of Dunces. The show plays now through December 20, 2015 at the Boston University Theatre. Opening Night is tonight, November 18.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by John Kennedy Toole, directed by David Esbjornson (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and All My Sons) and featuring Nick Offerman of NBC's "Parks and Recreation."

Nick Offerman stars as the larger-than-life character Ignatius J. Reilly: overweight, arrogant, eccentric, and still living with his mother in 1960s New Orleans. Called the Don Quixote of the French Quarter, Ignatius has a singular outlook on life. His farcical odyssey includes a riot in a department store and a raid on a strip club, and stints working at a pants factory and as a hot dog vendor. A Confederacy of Dunces is a hilarious, wild ride, filled with colorful characters and comic misadventures. The Washington Post says A Confederacy of Dunces is, "An epic comedy. A rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book."

"A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is an iconic novel with an incredible cult following," says Huntington Artistic Director Peter DuBois. "It's a privilege to work with playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, the brilliant and profoundly funny Nick Offerman, and our friend director David Esbjornson, and to be the first to share this exciting new play with Boston audiences."

"Adapting John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces into a play has been like wrestling Ignatius Riley to the stage," says adapter Jeffrey Hatcher. "The book is famously picaresque, episodic, and digressive, but the digressions are often the point. What I think we've arrived at is a play that focuses on the characters - Ignatius, his mother Mrs. Reilly, Burma Jones, Myrna Minkoff - without losing any of the book's color and atmosphere and humor." This worldwide bestselling novel, published by LSU press, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is presented in cooperation with a team of developmental partners including Robert Guza, John Hardy, LSU Press, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is supported by Huntington Season Sponsors Carol G. Deane and J. David Wimberly.

Photo Credit: T. Charles Erickson