Friedman, McInerney Cast In The Public Theater's Chasing The Green Light

The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Andrew D. Hamingson, Executive Director) is proud to announce the addition of Academy Award-nominated actress Anne Hathaway and the best-selling author of the Gossip Girl series Cecily von Ziegesar to the prestigious roster of participants for "Chasing The Green Light," the first Public Forum on Monday, October 18. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, a senior writer at Newsweek, The Public Forum is an exciting new series of lectures, debates and conversations that showcase leading voices in the arts, politics and the media. Public Forum events are open to the general public. Tickets for the inaugural event can be purchased for $25 at www.publictheater.org.

The October 18th Public Forum event, "Chasing The Green Light," coincides with The Public's acclaimed production of GATZ and will take place on Monday, October 18 at 8 p.m. The evening will explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel The Great Gatsby and how the country's recent troubles have affected the American dream. Sam Waterston is the host for the evening.

The three-part, 90-minute evening will begin with a writers' roundtable on Fitzgerald's legacy, featuring Michael Friedman (composer/lyricist, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), Jay McInerney (author of Bright Lights, Big City and How It Ended), Cecily von Ziegesar (author of the Gossip Girl novels), and Suzan-Lori Parks (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Topdog/Underdog). Following the roundtable, Arianna Huffington (co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post) will discuss her new book, Third World America, and trade views on money and the changing American dream with Reihan Salam (contributor to National Review and co-author of Grand New Party). The evening will close with a personal account of how tenuous American dreams can be as Anne Hathway (The Public Theater's Twelfth Night) reads from the heartbreaking letters that Zelda Fitzgerald wrote to her husband Scott over the course of their beautiful and damned life together.

Bios

Jeremy McCarter is the director of The Public Forum. He writes about culture and politics for Newsweek and is the editor of Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie (Yale University Press, 2009). Until 2008, he was the drama critic for New York Magazine. He has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, and The New York Sun.
Michael Friedman. His work at The Public includes the hit Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which has transferred to Broadway's Bernard Jacobs Theatre, as well as Paris Commune, Romeo and Juliet, Satellites, The Seagull, and Cymbeline. This fall he also wrote music for Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the Signature Theatre. Upcoming projects include Pretty Filthy, a musical about the adult film industry with The Civilians, an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's novel, Fortress of Solitude, and commissions from Playwrights Horizons, the Huntington Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His work with The Civilians includes This Beautiful City, [I Am] Nobody's Lunch, Canard, Canard, Goose? and the long-running Gone Missing. His other work as composer/lyricist includes Saved (Playwrights Horizons), Hoover Comes Alive! (La Jolla Playhouse),The Brand New Kid (Kennedy Center), and In the Bubble (at AMTP). His music has also been heard at NYTW, the Roundabout, Second Stage, Soho Rep, Theater for a New Audience, Signature, and The Acting Company, and regionally at the Guthrie, The Huntington, La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, Humana Festival, ART, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and internationally at London's Soho and Gate Theatres, and the Edinburgh Festival. He was also the dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon.

Anne Hathaway. Her work at The Public includes Shakespeare in The Park's 2009 production of Twelfth Night. Other theater credits include The Woman in White (Sydmonton Workshop), Carnival at City Center Encores! (Clarence Derwent Award). Her film credits include Alice In Wonderland (dir. Tim Burton), Bride Wars, Rachel Getting Married, (dir. Jonathan Demme, Oscar, SAG, Golden Globe nominations; NBR Best Actress), Get Smart, Becoming Jane, The Devil Wears Prada, Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee), The Princess Diaries 1 and 2 (dir. Garry Marshall). Televsion credits include "Get Real," "Family Guy," and "The Simpsons," for which she won a 2010 Emmy Award for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of thirteen books. Her latest, Third World America,
published in September 2010, chronicles the struggles of America's besieged middle class. She is also co-host of "Left, Right & Center," public radio's popular political roundtable
program, and is a frequent guest on television shows such as "Charlie Rose," "Real Time with Bill Maher," "Larry King Live," "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and "The Rachel Maddow Show." In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. She was named to the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people, and to the Financial Times' list of 50 people who shaped the decade.

JAY McINERNEY is the author of seven novels, including Bright Lights, Big City, his bestselling 1984 debut, which was cited by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century. Translated into more than 20 languages, Bright Lights has achieved the status of a contemporary classic. McInerney wrote the screenplay for the 1988 United Artists film version of the novel, along with several other screenplays, including "Gia." Among his other novels are Ransom (1985), Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), The Last of the Savages (1996), Model Behavior (1999), and The Good Life (2006). McInerney has written for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian (London), Corriere della Serra (Milan), and the Wall Street Journal. His novel The Good Life received the Grand Prix Literaire at the Deauville Film Festival in 2007. In 2009 he published How it Ended, a collection of short stories which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times.

Suzan-Lori Parks. Her plays include The Book of Grace; 365 Days/365 Plays; Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama); f-ing A; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play); The America Play; Venus (1996 Obie Award); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; and In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist). Her work is the subject of the PBS film The Topdog Diaries. Most of Parks' plays are published by Theatre Communications Group. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was also the recipient of a Lila Wallace--Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama) and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. In 2001 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Her work for the screen includes, as an actor: a leading role in . . . Plus One, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival; as a writer/director: Anemone Me (produced by Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes); as a writer: Girl 6 (directed by Spike Lee), screenplays for Brad Pitt, Jodie Foster, and Denzel Washington; and an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (for Oprah Winfrey Presents). Her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, is published by Random House. Parts 1, 8, and 9 of her play cycle Father Comes Home From the Wars premiered in 2009 at The Public Theater. Parks currently serves The Public Theater as Master Writer Chair.

REIHAN SALAM is a policy advisor at Economics 21. He blogs for National Review and he writes a column for The Daily Beast. He is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

CECILY VON ZIEGESAR is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers including the Gossip Girl series, which inspired the hit television show. Her latest novel, Cum Laude, is partly based on her experiences as a student at Colby College.

Sam Waterston was most recently seen at The Public Theater as Polonius in Hamlet. He portrayed Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy on "Law & Order" for 13 seasons. Waterston is a six-time Emmy Award nominee (three times for "Law & Order" and three more for "I'll Fly Away") who won the award for hosting the 10-part NBC informational series "Lost Civilizations." He also received a Golden Globe for "I'll Fly Away" and earned the 1999 Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance as McCoy. In addition, Waterston also earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance in The Killing Fields, and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Most Promising Newcomer for his portrayal of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Waterston's other notable feature credits include: the Woody Allen films Interiors, Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors; John Waters' Serial Mom, Hopscotch and Heaven's Gate; The Glass Menagerie (with Katharine Hepburn) and Eagle's Wing. He also starred opposite Jeff Bridges in Rancho Deluxe and with Reese Witherspoon in Man in the Moon. Waterston's important stage work includes Broadway and off-Broadway productions as well as many plays with The Public, such as Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Cymbeline, Measure for Measure and Hamlet. He earned a Tony Award nomination for his role as Abe Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois at the Lincoln Center Theater, as well as an Obie and Drama Desk Award for his portrayal of Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing.

The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Andrew D. Hamingson, Executive Director) was founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 and is now one of the nation's preeminent cultural institutions, producing new plays, musicals, and productions of classics at its downtown headquarters and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The Public's mandate to create a theater for all New Yorkers continues to this day onstage and through extensive outreach and education programs. Each year, over 250,000 people attend Public Theater-related productions and events at six downtown stages, including Joe's Pub, and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public has won 42 Tony Awards, 151 Obies, 41 Drama Desk Awards and four Pulitzer Prizes. The Public has brought 54 shows to Broadway, including Sticks and Bones; That Championship Season; A Chorus Line; The Pirates of Penzance; The Tempest; Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk; On the Town; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan; Topdog/Underdog; Elaine Stritch at Liberty; Take Me Out; Caroline, or Change; Well; Passing Strange; the Tony Award-winning revival of Hair; and this fall, the rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and the 2010 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice. www.publictheater.org.