Public Theater to Continue Forum Season with JOSEPH STIGLITZ ON THE RICH AND POOR, 12/9

The Public Theater will continue its Public Forum season with PUBLIC FORUM SOLO: JOSEPH STIGLITZ ON THE RICH AND POOR on Monday, December 9 at 7:00 p.m. at Joe's Pub. This one-night-only event will feature a talk by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on income inequality and what the artistic community can do about it, followed by a conversation featuring Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, and Public Works Director Lear deBessonet.

"Public Forum Solos are designed to bring great artists and theater audiences into contact with America's most vital thinkers," saidDirector of Public Forum Jeremy McCarter. "We can't think of a better way to inaugurate the Forum Solos than by hearing Joseph Stiglitz give a talk about the most pressing issue of our time, and having some of New York's most socially engaged artists respond to his ideas about what the creative community can do to help."

Single tickets, priced at $35, go on sale Thursday, October 31, 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. Public Theater member tickets, priced at $30, are on sale now. The Library at The Public is open nightly for food and drink, beginning at 5:30 p.m.

Already this season, Public Forum has inaugurated Drama Club, a "book club for plays." This monthly series features a reading of a great one-act play followed by a discussion of the issues it raises. The next Drama Club event will be Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy on Sunday, November 3, featuring Rachel Maddow and Elizabeth Marvel. The Drama Club season concludes on Tuesday, December 10, when Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner will be read and discussed by actor/playwright Lisa Kron; media theorist Douglas Rushkoff; Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of the recent cover story in The Atlanticabout trying to have it all; and more.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ is University Professor at Columbia University, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, and a lead author of the 1995 IPCC report, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank for 1997-2000. Stiglitz received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded annually to the American economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the subject. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University, held the Drummond Professorship at All Souls College Oxford, and has also taught at M.I.T, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. He is the author most recently of The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. In 2011, Time named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.

DARRYL "DMC" McDANIELS is a legendary music icon. After 30 years, and 25 million album sales it would be hard to overstate his influence on popular culture. As a founding member of the Grammy nominated Run-DMC, he changed music, culture, fashion, language and made American history. In 2009 he was inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame and just this year released two new singles, "Attention Please" featuring Pauley Perrette and "Noise Revolution" in advance of a new album to be released in 2014. DMC has just launched Darryl Makes Comics, a new company that through graphic novels, will bridge the gap between the worlds of hip-hop and the fantastic adventures he got wrapped up in as a youth. In between making music, comics and lecturing, DMC is an advocate for foster kids and is co-founder of the Felix Organization.

Oskar Eustis has served as the Artistic Director of The Public Theater since 2005. He came to The Public from Trinity Repertory Company, where he served as Artistic Director from 1994 to 2005. Eustis served as Associate Artistic Director at LA's Mark Taper Forum from 1989 to1994, and prior to that, he was with the Eureka Theatre Company, serving as Resident Director and Dramaturg from 1981 to1986 and Artistic Director from 1986 to1989. Eustis is currently a Professor of Dramatic Writing, and Arts and Public Policy at NYU, and has held professorships at UCLA, Middlebury College, and Brown University, where he founded and chaired the Trinity Rep/Brown University Consortium for professional theater training. Throughout his career, Eustis has been dedicated to the development of new plays as a director, dramaturg, and producer. At The Public, Eustis directed the New York premieres of Rinne Groff's Compulsionand The Ruby Sunrise, and Larry Wright's The Human Scale. At Trinity Rep, he directed the world premiere of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home and Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, both recipients of the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production. While at the Eureka Theatre, he commissioned Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. Eustis has also directed the world premieres of plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, and Eduardo Machado, among many others. His production of Julius Caesar won a Bay Area Critics Circle Award in 1988, and in the quarter century since then, he has directed and produced Shakespeare across the United States, in venues ranging from prisons to Broadway. Eustis received honorary doctorates from Rhode Island College in 1999 and Brown University in 2001.

Lear deBessonet has created large-scale theatrical events pairing artistic excellence with community organizing in New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Kazakhstan. Recent work includes Good Person of Szechwan featuring Taylor Mac (Obie Award, Drama Desk nom., Lilly Award), Sherie Rene Scott's Piece of Meat at 54 Below, On the Levee for Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3 (Time Out Best of 2010) and The Odyssey at The Old Globe, a community-based collaboration featuring professional artists alongside 180 San Diegans. In May 2009, her Don Quixote, a collaboration with homeless shelter Broad Street Ministry, premiered in Philadelphia (Philadelphia Weekly Best of 2009). Other credits include Saint Joan of the Stockyards (PS122), Toshi Reagon's LINES (Joe's Pub), Takarazuka(Clubbed Thumb), Monstrosity (13P), The Scarlet Letter (Intiman Theatre), transFigures (Women's Project), In the Dark Ages (National Opera Theatre of Kazakhstan), and When I Was a Ghost (Guthrie Theater). For Ten Thousand Things, she has directed productions ofMy Fair Lady and As You Like It that toured to prisons, community centers, and homeless shelters in Minneapolis. She created and ran the TICKETS FOR THE PEOPLE program in New York, an initiative designed to distribute tickets to non-traditional theatre-goers including immigrants, students, and seniors. In 2006 she was named one of Time Out New York's "25 People to Watch," and in 2008 she was honored with LMCC's Presidential Award for Artistic Excellence. A recipient of an NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors, she has also acted as a visiting professor at NYU-Tisch School of the Arts.

PUBLIC FORUM 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, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, David Brooks, David Byrne, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, Wynton Marsalis, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Christine Baranski, Matt Damon, Holly Hunter, Wendell Pierce, and Vanessa Redgrave, among others. Current Forum programs include Public Forum Drama Club, Public Forum Duets, Public Forum Solos, and the Public Forum Podcast.