Holly Hunter Set for Public Forum Drama Club's LIFE BY ASPHYXIATION Reading, 10/20

The Public Theater announced that Academy Award winner Holly Hunter has joined the first Public Forum Drama Club, Life By Asphyxiation by Kia Corthron, on Sunday, October 20 at 7:00 p.m. at Joe's Pub, kicking off the fourth season of PUBLIC FORUM.

Kia Corthron's 1995 play, Life by Asphyxiation, will be read and discussed on Sunday night by Holly Hunter (Katie); Ron Cephas Jones (Nat Turner); Wendell Pierce (Jojo); Kirk Bloodsworth (Warden), the first man exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence; and Barry Scheck (Stage Directions), the co-founder of the Innocence Project and a member of OJ Simpson's defense team.

Corthron's play tells the story of Jojo, a black man on death row for raping and murdering a white girl decades earlier. He is visited by her ghost, and Nat Turner is locked up in the cell next door. After reading the play, the cast will tackle the hard questions it raises about race, justice, mercy, friendship, and the death penalty.

Single tickets for the Public Forum Drama Club event, Life by Asphyxiation, are on sale now, starting at $40, and can be purchased at (212) 967-7555, www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street. The Library at The Public is open nightly for food and drink, beginning at 5:30 p.m.

The new series Drama Club, a book club for plays will also feature one-night-only readings and discussions of Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy by Tony Kushner on Sunday, November 3 at 7:00 p.m. and Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner on Tuesday, December 10 at 7:00 p.m. at Joe's Pub. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, the popular PUBLIC FORUM seriespresents the theater of ideas: conversations and performances with leading voices in politics, media, and the arts.

In Public Forum Drama Club, authors, musicians, journalists, scholars, and actors will come together to give onstage readings of one-act plays that have some special resonance in our lives today. Each reading will conclude with a discussion of the hard questions that the play raises about our politics, our culture, and the way we live now.

PUBLIC FORUM, now in its fourth year, presents the theater of ideas. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, this series of conversations and performances features leading voices in politics, media, and the arts. Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Cynthia Nixon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, Carl Bernstein, David Brooks, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Nathan Englander, Hendrik Hertzberg, Arianna Huffington, Bill Irwin, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, Francine Prose, Reihan Salam, Michael Sandel, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Ben Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Damian Woetzel, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Alan Alda, Christine Baranski, Michael Cerveris, Matt Damon, Michael Friedman, Gabriel Kahane, and Vanessa Redgrave, among others.

Photo by Sara De Boer / Retna Ltd