IMAGINING MADOFF Makes NY Premiere At 59E59 Theaters

59E59 Theaters (Val Day, Artistic Director; Brian Beirne, Managing Director) is thrilled to present the New York premiere of IMAGINING MADOFF, written by Deb Margolin and directed by Jerry Heymann. Produced by New Light Theater Project, IMAGINING MADOFF begins performances on Friday, March 1 for a limited engagement through Saturday, March 23. Press Opening is Wednesday, March 6. The performance schedule is Tuesday - Friday at 7:30 PM; Saturday at 2:30 PM & 7:30 PM; Sunday at 2:30 PM. Performances are at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Single tickets are $25 ($20 for 59E59 Members). To purchase tickets, call the 59E59 Box Office at 646-892-7999 or visit www.59e59.org.

Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff is in prison, determined to control his own narrative for history as he dictates stories to a visiting biographer about his childhood, his family, women, money, and an all-night meeting he had with Holocaust survivor and poet, Solomon Galkin.

Critics called IMAGINING MADOFF "intriguingly exercised" (Washington Post) and "rich with dramatic tension" (Tampa Bay Times), exploring themes of greed, willful blindness to the truth, and the beauty and danger of absolute faith, either in God or in men.

IMAGINING MADOFF was nominated for the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play or Musical at the 2012 Helen Hayes awards when it premiered in Washington, DC.

The cast features Jenny Allen (I Got Sick and Then I Got Better), Gerry Bamman (Obie and Drama League Awards and Drama Desk nomination for best featured actor as Richard Nixon in Nixon's Nixon), and Jeremiah Kissel (Eliot Norton nomination for the Boston premiere of IMAGINING MADOFF).

The design team includes Dara Wishingrad (scenic design); Michael O'Connor (lighting design); Kara Branch (costume design); and Leila Ben-Abdallah (prop design). The Production Stage Manager is Emma Burns.

Deb Margolin (playwright) is a playwright, actor, and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is the author of numerous plays, including Imagining Madoff, Turquoise, and Bringing the Fishermen Home, as well as ten solo performance plays which she has toured throughout the US, the most recent of which is 8 STOPS, a comedy concerning the grief of endless compassion. 8 STOPS takes a long, humorous, tender look at motherhood, the suburbs, the fear of death, and the inheritability of ideas. Deb was honored with an OBIE award for Sustained Excellence of Performance, the Kesselring Playwright Prize for her play Three Seconds in the Key, the 2008 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award and the Richard H. Broadhead Prize for teaching excellence at Yale University, where she is Associate Professor (adj.) in the undergraduate Theater Studies Program. Commissions include the NY Public Theater, Actors Theater of Louisville, PS122, The Jewish Museum of New York, and Dixon Place. Deb has been artist in residence at Hampshire College, University of Hawaii, Penn State University, and many others, and was Zale Writer in Residence at Tulane University in New Orleans. A compilation of some of her solo pieces as well as a multi-character play, Critical Mass, is entitled Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO. Deb lives in New Jersey, which she denies.

Jerry Heymann (director) is an award-winning director. Select credits include: Call Me Charlie with Danny DeVito (La MaMa), My Daddy's Serious American Gift (Tiffany Theatre in LA), A Country For Old Men (American Stage Company), Three (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Demeter's Lost Daughter (St. Clement's Theatre). For NLTP: Time Stands Still, Sight Unseen, Arthur and Esther, and No One Loves Us Here. He holds a PhD and MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and is a proud member of SDC.