Public Theater's Spring Public Forum Drama Club to Kick Off 2/10

The Public Theater will kick off the spring season of Public Forum Drama Club, a "book club for plays" that will feature one-night-only readings and discussions of great works of dramatic literature. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, the popular Public Forum series presents the theater of ideas: conversations and performances with leading voices in politics, media, and the arts.

In Public Forum Drama Club, authors, musicians, journalists, scholars, and actors come together to give onstage readings that have some special resonance in our lives today. Each reading concludes with a discussion of the hard questions that the evening raises about our politics, our culture, and the way we live now. The series launched last fall and featured Kia Corthron's Life by Asphyxiation with Holly Hunter; Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy with Rachel Maddow; and Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner with Cynthia Nixon.

Public Forum has also released a free podcast version of the Drama Club reading and discussion of Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, featuring Elizabeth Marvel, Denis O'Hare, and Rachel Maddow. Visit the iTunes Music Store (itun.es/i6FR5x9) to listen for free to the podcast and other Forum programs.

"Public Forum creates a meeting point where our greatest artists and leading thinkers can engage with the most vital issues of our time. Drama Club is our way of rooting that conversation in the shared experience of reading a great work for a live audience," said Public Forum Director Jeremy McCarter.

On Monday, February 10 at 7:00 p.m., Public Forum Drama Club will celebrate Valentine's Day with a reading and discussion of Shakespeare's epic poem about the pleasure and pain of love, Venus and Adonis. The young Adonis is seduced by the goddess Venus, with uncomfortable consequences for all of us. Reading the poem and discussing love in the modern day will be Audra McDonald, Will Swenson, Stephin Merritt, and others.

The next spring Drama Club reading and discussion will be An Evening With Tevye and Chava on Monday, March 17 at 7:00 p.m. Inspired by Alisa Solomon's Wonder of Wonders, a new cultural history of Fiddler on the Roof, the evening will trace how successive generations of storytellers used Sholom-Aleichem's characters to reflect changing concerns about family, identity, and more. Harvey Fierstein, who played a celebrated Tevye in the 2004 revival of Fiddler, will be joined by the show's co-creator, Sheldon Harnick, original Broadway cast member Austin Pendleton, renowned Yiddish theatermaker Jenny Romaine, and Alisa Solomon for an unforgettable night of songs, stories, and conversation.

The final spring Drama Club on Sunday, May 18 at 7:00 p.m. will feature The People by Susan Glaspell. Can radical writers change the world? In Glaspell's timely but little-known 1917 play, the editor of a struggling revolutionary magazine has to decide whether to keep up the fight - with plenty of not-always-helpful input from his staff and his readers. The evening's special cast will be comprised entirely of our leading political journalists, including David Brooks (The New York Times), Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic), Michelle Goldberg (The Nation), Christopher Hayes (MSNBC), Hendrik Hertzberg (The New Yorker), Maria Hinojosa (NPR), Reihan Salam (National Review), Ben Smith (BuzzFeed), Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin), and more.

Public Theater Member tickets for the spring Public Forum Drama Club series at Joe's Pub at The Public are on sale now. Single tickets, starting at $30, go on sale Thursday, January 16 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. The Library at The Public is open nightly for food and drink, beginning at 5:30 p.m.