L.A. Theatre Works adds Arthur Miller's first Broadway play, which debuted in 1944 and enjoyed an enormously successful Broadway revival in 2002, to its previously-recorded collection of eight Arthur Miller works. Directed by UCLA Theater Professor Michael Hackett, who has directed for the Royal Opera, Covent Garden; Royal Theatre at the Hague; Centrum Sztuki Studio and Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw among others, and featuring Kurtwood Smith ( That 70s Show) and Tegan West (screenwriter, The Cave), The Man Who Had All the Luck gets five performances March 14 through 18 at the Skirball Cultural Center.
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Arthur Miller's lyrical, powerful and humorous fable is set during the Great Depression. Everything comes easily to young David Beeves; he seems to get everything his heart desires. But David's good fortune merely serves to heighten the tragedies of those around him, offering evidence of a capricious god or, worse, a godless, arbitrary universe. David's journey toward fulfillment becomes a nightmare of existential doubts, a desperate grasp for reason in a cosmos seemingly devoid of any, and a struggle that will take him to the brink of madness," state production notes.
The Man Who Had All the Luck opened at the Forrest Theater in 1944 to less than enthusiastic reviews, running for a total of four performances and nearly convincing the nascent playwright to give up on writing for the stage. Three years later, in 1947, Miller became internationally famous when his play
All My Sons debuted on Broadway.
The Man Who Had All the Luck remained a relatively unknown play for over half a century. In 2000, The Antaeus Company revived it in a small Los Angeles production under the direction of co-producer
Dan Fields, and in 2002 it returned to Broadway in a critically acclaimed Roundabout Theatre production directed by
Scott Ellis.
L.A. Theatre Works, America's premier broadcaster and publisher of audio plays, has already preserved eight plays by
Arthur Miller on CD with star-studded casts. Available through LATW's Audio Theatre Catalogue as well as in bookstores and libraries are:
The Crucible starring
Richard Dreyfuss,
Stacy Keach, Ed Begley, Jr., Rene Auberjonois,
Hector Elizondo and Bud Cort;
Broken Glass starring
JoBeth Williams,
David Dukes, Lawrence Pressman and
Linda Purl;
All My Sons starring
James Farentino,
Arye Gross and
Julie Harris;
The Price starring
Richard Dreyfuss,
Amy Irving and
Harris Yulin;
A View from the Bridge starring
Mary McDonnell and Ed ONeill;
Incident at Vichy starring Tim DeKay, Ben Diskin, Robert Lesser, Raphael Sbarge and Armin Shimmerman;
After the Fall starring Amy Brenneman and
Anthony LaPaglia; and
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan starring Brian Cox, Jenny O'Hara,
Amy Pietz and Gregory Itzin
Five performances of
The Man Who had All the Luck take place Wednesday, April 11 at 8 pm; Thursday, April 12 at 8 pm; Friday, April 13 at 8 pm; Saturday, April 14 at 3 pm; and Sunday, April 15 at 4 pm.
A Meet-the Artists discussion follows the matinee on Saturday, April 14. The Skirball Cultural Center is located at 2701 N. Sepulveda Boulevard, in the Santa Monica Mountains just off the San Diego (405) Freeway (exit Skirball Center Drive). Tickets range from $20.00 to $46.00. For reservations and information, call the L.A. Theatre Works Box Office at (310) 827-0889 or go to
www.latw.org.
