Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn & More to Lead FUN HOME at Public Theater; Full Casting Announced for Fall 2013 Season

The Public Theater announced today that single tickets are now on sale for the Fall 2013 Season, which will begin in September with ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON, created and performed by Mike Daisey. Single tickets are available by calling (212) 967-7555, www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at Astor Place at 425 Lafayette Street.

Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON will begin performances in Joe's Pub at The Public on Thursday, September 5 and run for 29 unique, consecutive performances through Thursday, October 3.

Mike Daisey returns with a breathtakingly epic theatrical event: a story told over the course of a lunar month, a new monologue every night. Each evening stands alone as a single episode, but together they create a living theatrical novel set against the secret history of New York City-a city that is loved and loathed and larger than life. From Pentecostal church services held in IKEA showrooms to Nikola Tesla's laboratories in the Lower East Side, from the infamous Mole People's convocations deep beneath the subway lines to the hidden and terrifying plans of Robert Moses, Daisey weaves a story of ordinary magic in a most extraordinary city. Night after night he will strive like Sheherazade to tell the largest story ever attempted in the American theater.

Elevator Repair Service returns with the world premiere of ARGUENDO on Tuesday, September 10. Directed by John Collins, ARGUENDO will run through Sunday, October 6, with an official opening on Tuesday, September 24.

Last year, The Public Theater co-produced, to great acclaim, GATZ (a unique word-for-word staging of The Great Gatsby) created and performed by Elevator Repair Service (ERS), one of America's most acclaimed theater ensembles. This season, The Public reunites with ERS for a co-production of ARGUENDO, a playful riff on the 1991 Supreme Court case Barnes v. Glen Theatre. In this provocative case, a group of exotic dancers, citing the First Amendment, challenged a ban on public nudity. ERS stages the oral argument of the case verbatim with their signature theatricality, wit and physical precision. The production design features a breathtaking swirl of animated text projections by celebrated visual artist, Ben Rubin. ARGUENDO was co-commissioned by The Public Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.

ARGUENDO is designed to be a thought-provoking piece of theater. Every performance on Wednesdays and Sundays will be followed by talkbacks with ERS Artistic Director John Collins, and constitutional law scholars and journalists who write about the Court. These talkbacks will not only give audiences a chance to learn more about the history of the case, they will give them a chance to participate, themselves, in the discussion that the Court itself has begun.

Following a sold-out Public Lab run last season, FUN HOME, with music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, will have its world premiere on Monday, September 30. Directed by Sam Gold and based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, FUN HOME will run through Sunday, November 3, with an official press opening on Tuesday, October 22.

The complete cast of FUN HOME will feature Griffin Birney (John Bechdel), Michael Cerveris
(Bruce Bechdel), Roberta Colindrez (Joan), Noah Hinsdale (Christian Bechdel), Judy Kuhn (Helen), Sydney Lucas (Small Alison), Beth Malone (Alison), Joel Perez (Roy), and Alexandra Socha (Medium Alison).

From four-time Tony Award-nominated composer Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change) and Tony-nominee Lisa Kron (In The Wake, Well) comes a fresh, daring new musical based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family's Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father's hidden desires. Directed by Sam Gold, FUN HOME is a groundbreaking world-premiere musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.

The Foundry Theatre's production of GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN will begin on Friday, October 18. With a translation by John Willett and directed by The Public's Public Works director Lear deBessonet, GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN will run through Sunday, November 24, with an official opening on Tuesday, October 29.

Can we practice goodness and create a world to sustain it? In this comic and complex play, one of Brecht's most entertaining characters, Shen Tei, the good-hearted, penniless, cross-dressing prostitute, is forced to disguise herself as a savvy businessman named Shui Ta to master the ruthlessness necessary to be a "good person" in a cruel world of limited resources. The award-winning Foundry Theatre and director Lear deBessonet bring this theatrical classic to life for the 21st century with Taylor Mac in the lead and original live music by César Alvarez with The Lisps. The cast also features original members Kate Benson,Ephraim Birney, Vinie Burrows, Clifton Duncan, Jack Allen Greenfield, Annie Golden, Brooke Ishibashi, Paul Juhn, Mia Katigbak, Lisa Kron, David Turner, and Darryl Winslow.

The Apple family will return to The Public in October with REGULAR SINGING, Richard Nelson's fourth and final play in this captivating series. It will open on Friday, November 22, 2013 - the 50th Anniversary of JFK's assassination that shocked the world. All tickets for this Public Lab production are $20.

Each year since 2010, Tony Award winner Richard Nelson has premiered a new play about the fictional, liberal Apple family of Rhinebeck, New York. This year, Nelson's fascinating Apple family will come together once more as the first three Apple plays triumphantly return, in repertory, along with the world premiere of the fourth and final play in this powerful and timely series. The cast features Maryann Plunkett (Barbara), Jay O. Sanders (Richard), Laila Robins (Marian), Jon Devries (Benjamin), Stephen Kunken (Tim), and Sally Murphy (Jane).

These plays about family, politics, change, and the way we live today burst with remarkable immediacy. Each of THE APPLE FAMILY PLAYS originally premiered on the night on which it is set. In THAT HOPEY CHANGEY THING, the Apples reflect on the state of their family and discuss memory, manners and politics as polls close on mid-term election night 2010 and a groundswell of conservative sentiment flips Congress on its head. In SWEET AND SAD, a family brunch stirs up discussions of loss, remembrance and a decade of change. And SORRY, which premiered last fall, finds the Apples sorting through family anxieties and confusion on the day of electing the President.

THE APPLE FAMILY PLAYS will begin performances on Tuesday, October 22 and run through Sunday, December 15.

Single tickets for The Public Theater's Fall 2013 Season are available now by calling (212) 967-7555, www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at Astor Place at 425 Lafayette Street. The Library at The Public will also be open nightly for food and drink, beginning at 5:30 p.m., and Joe's Pub will continue to offer some of the best music in the city.

Photo by Walter McBride