GRACE to Host Post-Show Talkback With Author Elizabeth Gilbert, 10/17

GRACE on Broadway has announced that international best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) will participate in a post-show conversation about the play as it relates to issues of faith directly following the Wednesday, October 17th at 7pm performance of the show.

Elizabeth will appear on-stage with Reverend Stephen Phelps of the Riverside Church of New York. All audience members in attendance that evening are invited to participate in the discussion, including an opportunity for Q&A. Grace is a strictly limited engagement at the Cort Theatre (138 West 48th Street) through January 6, 2013. It began performances on Thursday, September 13th, with its official opening night upcoming on Thursday, October 4, 2012.

Elizabeth Gilbert began her career in New York as a journalist for such publications as Spin, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. She was a three-time finalist for The National Magazine work, and an article she wrote in GQ about her experiences bartending on the Lower East Side eventually became the basis for the movie Coyote Ugly. In 2000, Elizabeth published her first novel, Stern Men (a story of brutal territory wars between two remote fishing islands off the coast of Maine) which was a New York Times Notable Book. In 2002, Elizabeth published The Last American Man – the true story of the modern day woodsman Eustace Conway. This book, her first work of non-fiction, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Elizabeth is best known, however for her 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love, which chronicled her journey alone around the world, looking for solace after a difficult divorce. The book was an international bestseller, translated into over thirty languages, with over 10 million copies sold worldwide, and a movie version in the making, starring Julia Roberts. The book became so popular that, in 2008, Time Magazine named Elizabeth as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2010, Elizabeth published a follow-up called Committed—a memoir which explored her ambivalent feelings about the institution of marriage. The book immediately became a number one New York Times bestseller, and was also received with warm critical praise. Her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, a sprawling tale of 19th century botanical exploration, will be published in autumn 2013. Elizabeth Gilbert lives in the small river town of Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she and her husband (more widely known as “That Brazilian Guy From Eat, Pray, Love”) run a large and delightful imports store called Two Buttons.

The Talkback Series at Broadway’s Grace continues on October 24th when Dr. Michael Brown of the Marble Collegiate Church NYC, who consulted on Grace during the rehearsal process, and Ron William Walden, the Assistant Director of the MPS Program for Development and Academic Assessment at the NY Theological Seminary, will similarly discuss the issues of faith and religion that are explored in the play directly following the evening performance.

In alternating scenes of hilarity and poignancy, life turns surreal for an eclectic foursome whose destinies collide in the Sunshine State. A wide-eyed young couple (Rudd & Arrington) head south with big plans to open a chain of Gospel-themed motels. When an agitated rocket scientist (Shannon) and a prickly pest-control man (Asner) enter the picture, the couple's ordered world is thrown into utter chaos. Grace examines those illusive paradoxes: Believing vs. Knowing and Coincidence vs. Fate.

Grace features an all-star cast including Paul Rudd (Knocked Up, “Friends”) and Academy Award® nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, “Boardwalk Empire”), with Steppenwolf’s Kate Arrington and seven-time Emmy Award®-winner Ed Asner (“Lou Grant”, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”).

Grace first premiered to critical acclaim at The Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC in 2004, and was subsequently seen in a celebrated production at Northlight Theater in Chicago, and at the Pasadena Playhouse in Los Angeles (where it received 3 LA Drama Critics Circle Awards including Best Play).

Paul Rudd made his Broadway debut in Tony Award-winning The Last Night of Ballyhoo in 1997 and has since starred in Twelfth Night (1998), Three Days of Rain (2006) and Off Broadway in The Shape of Things (2001), among many other stage productions. Michael Shannon’s numerous NY stage credits include Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep and Craig Wright’s Mistakes Were Made. He received an Academy Award nomination for Revolutionary Road, is a series regular on “Boardwalk Empire," and stars in upcoming feature films: Premium Rush, Iceman and Man of Steel. Kate Arrington, who was critically praised for her recent performance at the Goodman Theatre in Iceman Cometh opposite Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy, is a Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member, whose productions there include The Hot L Baltimore, The Well-Appointed Room, The Pain and the Itch and The Violet Hour. Ed Asner last appeared on Broadway in 1989, opposite Madeline Kahn in Born Yesterday. This production of Grace marks its New York Premiere (in an updated script) and the Broadway debuts of playwright Craig Wright, director Dexter Bullard, and Michael Shannon, who have a fifteen-plus year history of collaboration in the theater, including the recent production of Mistakes Were Made.