Cast Set for Chicago Premiere of Reina Hardy’s GLASSHEART at City Lit

City Lit Theater has revealed its cast and creative team for the Chicago Premiere of GLASSHEART, by Chicago-based playwright Reina Hardy. City Lit Executive Artistic Director Brian Pastor will direct this new take on the Beauty and the Beast story, in which the Beast has had to live centuries enduring his existence in a hideous body. He has moved to present-day Chicago with his only friend, a lamp named Only, who thinks he should get out more and meet a woman who might fall in love with him and break the spell. The landlady of their new home – a low rent apartment in an unnamed Chicago neighborhood – happens to be a Witch, perhaps the one who turned him into a beast in the first place. But there is hope when Only and the Beast meet their new neighbor Aiofe, a recent transplant from Michigan who is looking forward to her new life as a barista in the Windy City. Though the Beast is very much an 18th Century European gentleman and Aiofe a 21st Century independent woman, they find they have much in common and together learn things about their true selves and what it means to be human. GLASSHEART will open to the press on Sunday, January 19 at 3 pm, following previews from January 10, and play through February 23, 2025.

Pastor’s cast for the four-person play will include three veterans of City Lit and the Chicago theater scene, along with one newcomer. Actor and playwright Mark Pracht, a Jeff Award winner for his leading role in REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT with The Artistic Home, a nominee for his John Proctor in Invictus Theatre’s THE CRUCIBLE, and known most recently to City Lit audiences for the title role in PROMETHEUS BOUND, will play The Beast. Additionally, Pracht’s “Four Color Trilogy” of plays about the comic book industry was produced at City Lit over the past three seasons, concluding with THE HOUSE OF IDEAS this past fall. Kat Evans, whose many roles at City Lit include Bridget in THE SAFE HOUSE and Io to Pracht’s Prometheus, will play the lamp called Only.
 
Appearing as The Witch will be Elaine Carlson, whose most recent of many City Lit roles was as Meg in THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. She has earned Jeff Award nominations for her title role in MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION and her Eleanor of Aquitane in A LION IN WINTER, both with Promethean Theatre Ensemble; and won an Actress in a Principal Role Jeff Award for SALT OF THE EARTH with Famous Door Theatre. Completing the cast as the independent, politically minded Aiofe will be Cailyn Murray, a new-to-Chicago actress who moved from Washington DC to Chicago in 2023. Since arriving in Chicago, she has appeared in Corn Productions’ DRINK:PRIDE and has been a Dungeon Master for Otherworld Theatre’s Interactive D20 Dungeons & Dragons events. Cailyn holds a BA in Theatre from Muhlenberg College. 

The Production Team will include Jeremiah Barr (Scenic Design), Liz Cooper (Lighting Design), Petter Wahlbäck (Sound Design and Original Music), kClare McKellaston (Costume Design), Paul Chakrin (Violence Design), Courtney Abbott (Intimacy Coordinator), Meghan Norine McGrath (Props Design), and Hazel Marie Flowers-McCabe (Stage Manager).
 
A Chicago-based self-described “playwright and fabulist,” Reina Hardy’s work has been produced across the United States, and in the UK, Australia and Greece. GLASSHEART was praised by the WASHINGTON POST for its “off-key insights” and its “funky, poetic” nature. THE WASHINGTONIAN called it “enchanting, funny, and thought-provoking.”
 

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