NAN AND THE LOWER BODY Audio Recording Starring Richard Schiff, Ginnifer Goodwin & Josh Dallas Now Available

Emmy award-winning actor Richard Schiff (The Good Doctor, The West Wing), Ginnifer Goodwin and fellow Once Upon A Time co-star and real-life husband Josh Dallas, and Shannon Cochran (The Ring) star in a new L.A. Theatre Works audio theater recording of Nan and the Lower Body by playwright Jessica Dickey. LATW senior producer Anna Lyse Erikson directs the state-of-the-art production, now available for digital download and online streaming for $4.99 at latw.org.

Inspired by the playwright’s grandmother, Nan and The Lower Body is a frank, funny and engaging new play that celebrates the strength, beauty and mystery of the female body. When Pap smear inventor Dr. George Papanicolaou takes on a brilliant new assistant, Nan Day, he senses she’s hiding a secret. As Dr. Pap discovers the truth, he learns he may hold the key to solving her greatest mystery.

“After my grandmother's death, my Uncle Mark told me that he believed one of her periods of working in a lab was working for Dr. Papanicolaou, who created the Pap smear, and I found that sort of fascinating, gutting, shocking,” Dickey explained in an interview. “Even though I had grown up with my grandparents and we were very close, I felt I still failed to really know them in their full spectrum of personhood and all their talents and phases of life. So the play was born of the need to ameliorate that gap in the knowing, of my grandmother in particular.”

According to Theater Mania, “The play explores long-standing issues around gender equality in the home and workplace as well as conflicts between science and faith. It honors progress but also paints a portrait of how little has changed.”

Originally commissioned by the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, dedicated to bridging science and the arts in the modern world, the play received its world premiere at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. The audio recording is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ “Relativity Series” of science-themed plays, for which the Sloan Foundation provides lead funding. 

L.A. Theatre Works stands apart in its approach to making great theater widely accessible and affordable, bringing plays into homes and classrooms of millions of theater lovers, teachers and students each year. The company’s syndicated audio theater series broadcasts weekly on public radio stations across the U.S. (locally, in Southern California, on KPFK 90.7 FM); can be downloaded as a podcast via iTunes, NPR One, or wherever you get your podcasts; and can be streamed on demand at latw.org. The L.A. Theatre Works catalog of nearly 600 recorded plays is the largest archive of its kind in the world. Audiofile magazine calls L.A. Theatre Works productions “the gold standard for fine audio theater recordings.”


For more information or to place an order, call (310) 827-0889 or go to latw.org.