A STEADY RAIN and More Slated for Spring at Hudson Theatre Works

Hudson Theatre Works, North Jersey's most innovative professional theater company, announces its upcoming spring production and its slate for Playworks, its annual new play reading series.

The New Jersey premiere of A STEADY RAIN by Keith Huff will play the Mainstage, with Mark McCarthy's THE JAR BEHIND THE JAKES and STARRING ELIZABETH, THE MUSICAL by Joanne Hoersch (book & lyrics), author of last year's hit play JACKSON IS GONE, and Donald Stark (music), set for Playworks.

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A STEADY RAIN BY KEITH HUFF
Directed by Frank Licato

May 5 thru May 22, 2016

At The Historic Weehawken Water Tower, 4078 Park Avenue, Weehawken, NJ (for transportation information, click here)

Schedule: Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8;00PM and, Sundays, at 7PM

Tickets: $20 general admission. Brown Paper Tickets: 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.org. For students with student ID and seniors 65 and older, tickets are $15 at all times.

In A STEADY RAIN, Joey and Denny have been best friends since kindergarten. After working together for several years as policemen in Chicago, they are practically family. But when a domestic disturbance call takes a turn for the worse, their friendship is put on the line. The result is a difficult journey into a moral gray area where trust and loyalty struggle for survival against a sobering backdrop of criminal lowlifes. A dark duologue filled with sharp storytelling and biting repartee. A Steady Rain explores the complexities of a lifelong bond tainted by domestic affairs, violence and the rough streets of Chicago.

KEITH HUFF (Playwright) has an MFA from the University of Iowa's Playwright's Workshop and is the recipient of a Jeff Award, a Drama-Logue Award, the Cunningham Prize, the John Gassner Award, the Berrilla Kerr Award, and three Illinois Arts Council Playwriting Fellowships. He has developed plays at O'Neill Theatre Center National Playwrights Conference, The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, New York Stage and Film, Steppenwolf, Berkeley Rep, Victory Gardens, The Eureka Theatre, Studio Arena Theatre, Wooly Mammoth, Eye of the Storm, Echo Theatre, Act One/Showtime, Alice's 4th Floor, Florida Studio Theatre, WordBridge Playwrights Laboratory, and Midwest PlayLabs. His plays have been produced Off-Broadway, internationally, and nationally. Recent productions include the sold-out Broadway run of "A Steady Rain" featuring Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, the critically acclaimed smash hit "The Bird and Mr. Banks" at the Road Theater in LA, Pursued By Happiness at Steppenwolf Theater First-Look Festival, Gray City at American Repertory Theater, Dog Stories at Stageworks/Hudson, Deep Blue Sea with CollaborAction at Steppenwolf, Harry's Way and Prosperity at Riverside Theater, and The Age of Cynicism or Karaoke Night at The Hog at Chicago Dramatists and Bloomington Playwrights Project. Keith is currently adapting A Steady Rain for film, developing a Chicago-based series The Brothers Buczakowski for HBO, and a Co-Producer for AMC's Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning series Mad Men.

CHARLES F. WAGNER IV (DENNY) was most recently seen in the sold out Off-broadway run of The Great Society. His regional credits include, Lt. Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men at Flatrock Playhouse and over the last 13 summers with the Carolinian Shakespeare Festival doing several great roles including Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream, Claudius in Hamlet and Toby Belch inTwelfth Night. He has appeared on TV in A Perfect Murder, A Crime to Remember, Evil, I and Extinction: the G.M.O. Chronicles. He can also be seen and heard regularly in commercials and voiceovers. Chuck Has studied in New York at the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, H.B. Studios and the Weist Barron School of Film and Television. He is a member of the Alliance Theater Rep. in N.J.

GREG ERBACH (JOEY) was last seen as Lenny Smalls in Hudson Theatre Works Of Mice And Men. Vice president and Producing Director of HTW, he co-founded the company with Artistic Director Frank Licato and former board president Karen Brady in 2011. He has produced every main stage HTW show since the theater's inception. He played Terry Malloy in the Northeast's premier of Budd Shulberg's "On the Waterfront" at the Renegade Theatre in Hoboken, prior to its arrival on Broadway. He played Art Kroeger in the critically acclaimed "Shannon Doyle Incident" at the Samuel Beckett on Theatre row. A native of Hudson County hehas been working on and off the stage in professional theatre for over 30 years. Currently the Assistant Electrical Construction Boss at the Metropolitan Opera House, he has been an actor, stage manager, producer, carpenter, electrician and technical director for hundreds of productions at venues such as the American Place Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, The Weston Playhouse, The American Jewish Theatre, The John Houseman and The Equity Library Theatre. He was the technical director for John Leguizamo's first two Broadway Video productions Mambo Mouth and Spic-O-Rama for HBO.. He was been on the Board of Directors of the Park Performing Arts Center since the boards inception in 1999 till he left the board in 2010 to work on starting this company.

FRANK LICATO (Director) is Artistic Director of Hudson Theatre Works where he recently directed Of Mice and Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the world premiere of 3 Men by Mike Folie, BASH by Neil Labute and the world premiere of Jackson Is Gone by Joanne Hoersch. He has worked with such theatre luminaries as Joseph Chaiken, Peter Brook and Robert Brustein. As a director he received an Applause Award from the New Jersey Theatre Alliance and a Perry Award for Best Director for The Grapes of Wrath at the Chatham Playhouse. He was named Best Director by the Off-Broadway revue for his production of Sam Shepard's Seduced. His production of Neil Labute's The Shape of Things was selected as a regional finalist in the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre Festival. His production of Robert Clem's Fever was voted a top 10 show at the 2001 New York International Fringe Festival and his production of On the Waterfront was made into the award winning documentary, Waiting for Budd. He is a member of the Actors Studio Playwright and Director Unit and Director's Unit.

AND on sequential Mondays, May 9 and 16, we continue our PlayWorks series of new play readings with 2 playwrights from Hudson County, New Jersey.

This successful series has produced 3 Men, award winning one man show, best non-fiction play at this year's solo festival, Jackson Is Gone, last year's premiere fall production at Hudson Theatre Works, as well as plays that went on to be produced at the Walnut Street Theater, Stage 21, Dublin, Ireland, as well as continued development at Luna Stage, Penguin Rep, and New Jersey Rep.

May 9 - The Jar Behind the Jakes - The Jar Behind the Jakes is a survival story. The McGranahan family is struggling through the great hunger of 19th century Ireland. Young Mikeen has a decision to make: Should he stay by his family and help them survive, or emigrate and hope to get work and send back money for the rest of them before it's too late? Humor, poetry, and quotes from the historical record of the British parliament intersperse this story of how the Irish wound up in America.

May 16 - Starring Elizabeth, the Musical - In 2010, at the height of the recession, Carthage Financial, a prestigious Wall St. accounting firm, begins a series of layoffs and cutbacks, all supposedly done for the greater cause of saving the firm from financial ruin. But when a standard issue desk chair turns out to be a cardboard box, and the most recent hire is a blow-up doll named Charlotte, Elizabeth Bailen, the manager of the IT department, begins to wonder what hidden motives are actually driving this "new reality." As the situation deteriorates, as loyalties break down and belief systems crumble, she realizes that cosmic forces and new life forms are emerging from the ruins.

Mark McCarthy is an actor, director, stage combat choreographer, dialect coach, all around theatre educator, and published playwright with nationwide experience. He's written dozens of short plays, including One Woman's Onions, which received a production at Jersey Voices. He's also written four full length screenplays, and is currently working on a fifth. Several monologues from his play Occupational Hazards have been published by Smith and Kraus in their Audition Arsenal series. The Jar Behind the Jakes is his first full-length play.

Joanne Hoersch is a recipient of a 2012 grant from the NJ State Council on the Arts for her play, Jackson is Gone, which was also selected for a roundtable reading at the Lark Theatre. Her play Starring Elizabeth was part of Hudson Theater Works 2013 PlayWorks series and was also part of New Jersey Playwrights Theater 2014 reading series. Her one act Bunnies, based on her experiences as a Playboy Bunny, was part of the 2015 PlayWorks series. Prior to becoming a playwright, she was a fiction writer. She received a Woolrich fellowship for fiction from Columbia University, was a semi-finalist in the Heekin Foundation's national short story contest, and was a 1998 grantee from the NJ State Council on the Arts for her short story, Josie Going Places. She is a 2014 honorable mention in Glimmertrain for her short story Lilacs. She is currently working on a new play about the Romantic poet Percy Shelley.

Donald Stark (Music) is resident composer and sound designer for Hudson Theatre Works. He designs sound for theater and composes music for stage, film, and other media. Most recently, Donald composed original scores and designed sound for Garage Theatre Group's season of four plays: Enron, John Guare's Landscape of theBody, Adam Siegel's Lost in History, and Ubu Roi, mounted at the Black Box Theatre at Bergen PAC. Donald has also designed sound of recent Hudson Theatre Works main stage productions, including Neil LaBute's BASH, Michael Folie's 3 Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Of Mice and Men. The previous season, Donald composed music for the Fringe Festival production Dragon's Breath and designed sound for the Theatre Row production of Michael Puzzo's Spirits of Exit Eleven and Summit Playhouse's revival of Best Man. He is currently penning tunes for the musical Dragon Empress of China.

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Performances run Thursday, 5 May 2016 through Sunday, 22 May 2016 at the Historic Weehawken Water Tower, 4100 Park Avenue, Weehawken, NJ. For transportation information, go to www.weehawken-nj.us/transportation.html. Showtimes for A Steady Rain: Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays at 8PM and Sundays at 7pm; and for PlayWorks: Monday evenings May 9 and 16 at 7:30 pm. $10 suggested donation. TICKETS TO ALL EVENTS AVAILABLE AT BROWN PAPER TICKETS.

Hudson Theatre Works is a new member of the New Jersey Theater Alliance and nominated for the 2015 New Jersey Stage Award as one of the "Best Places to See a World Premiere". Hudson Theatre Works is a not for profit, equity theatre committed to ensemble collaboration as well as artistic risk through its work with its permanent company, guest artists, partner institutions and the surrounding community. It is dedicated to a rugged aesthetic and seeks to tell stories, both new and old, classic and contemporary, which reflect our lives, relationships and the world today. Past productions have included Of Mice and Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the world premiere play 3 Men which won Best Non Fiction piece at this years' Solo Fest, the New Jersey Premiere of Neil Labute's Bash and last year's world premiere of Jackson Is Gone by New Jersey State Council on the Arts winner Joanne Hoersch. The company operates out of two venues, the theater at Weehawken High School and the intimate Weehawken Water Tower. For more, visit www.hudsontheatreworks.org.

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