Jane Austen's PERSUASION at The Players

Sara Holdren will direct a staged reading of Jane Austen's PERSUASION, adapted for the theatre by emerging playwright Sarah Rose Kearns, on Monday, April 9th at 7 o'clock at The Players in New York City, 16 Gramercy Park South. This performance will feature Jack Halpin, Marc LeVasseur, Patricia McNamara, Chris Mixon, Daniel Reece, Amanda Jill Robinson (also acting as music director), Maggie Wetzel, Esther Williamson, and Jenna Zhu.

After the show, Austen scholar Juliette Wells will join the director and playwright for a short Q&A, with Marybeth Ihle as moderator. Dr. Wells is the editor of the Penguin Classics 200th-Anniversary Deluxe Edition of PERSUASION (copies of which will be available for purchase at the event); she is also the author of "Reading Austen in America" and "Everybody's Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 and 2011).

Ms. Holdren received her MFA in directing from Yale University in 2015 and was appointed lead theatre critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com in 2017. She is the recipient of the 2016-17 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and the Artistic Director/Co-Founder of the Brooklyn-based theatre company Tiltyard. She specializes in Shakespeare, reimagined classics, and spectacular, outsized stories new and old.

Sarah Rose Kearns is a writer, performer, and lifelong Austen enthusiast. As an actress, she has appeared at Symphony Space (with Gingold Theatrical Group), the Long Wharf, Baltimore Center Stage, Chez Bushwick, and elsewhere; and she holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from Columbia University. She wishes to acknowledge the Jane Austen Society of North America, New York Metropolitan Region and the HB Playwrights Foundation for their assistance towards the development of this new play.

Anita Taub, a member of both The Players and The Jane Austen Society of North America, is the sponsor of PERSUASION at The Players.

The theatre will open at 6:30 PM, and the performance will begin at 7:00.

Tickets for this one-night-only special event may be purchased for $25 online through Artful.ly. For additional information about PERSUASION and its history, please visit www.janeaustenspersuasion.com.