Special Benefit Reading Of VERITAS To Be Held 5/25

A special benefit reading of Stan Richardson's Veritas, for Lambda Legal, starring Tate Ellington (Broadway: The Philanthropist; Film: Remember Me), Mitch Dean (Altar Boyz), Matt Steiner (The Acting Company's Jane Eyre) and directed by Ryan J. Davis (White Noise, Broadway Beauty Pageants) will perform on Tuesday, May 25th at 8PM. This performance will include music by Rachel Peters (Stretch [a fantasia]) freely adapted from the Harvard Song Book.

Inspired by true events, Veritas is about a group of young men at Harvard in 1920 whose promising futures fell prey to the Harvard Secret Court: a furtive gay witch-hunt conducted by the president and deans of the school to expurgate Harvard of all homosexuality. Full casting will be announced next week.

The play will be fully produced as part of the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival in August. More information at www.veritastheplay.com.

Profits from this reading benefit Lambda Legal, the nation's oldest and largest legal organization working for the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, and people with HIV/AIDS. Tickets are now on-sale at BrownPaperTickets.com.

About Veritas

In the spring of 1920, a Harvard undergraduate's suicide unearthed a hidden homosexual subculture. Grief-stricken and demanding justice, his family brought two incriminating letters to the attention of Harvard's legendary president, Lawrence Lowell, who hastily assembled a team of deans to expurgate these sexual deviants before they infected other students on campus. The five-man committee, self-titled "The Secret Court," soon found 14 individuals "guilty" of homosexuality, forcing them to vacate not only Harvard, but the city of Cambridge as well. Astonishingly, this clandestine witch-hunt--the cause of two suicides and a slew of punctured lives--remained undiscovered until 2002, when a researcher for The Harvard Crimson accidentally stumbled across the "Secret Court Files, 1920″: 500 pages of cryptic documents describing in detail the systematic and malicious persecution of these students.

First workshopped at Classic Stage Company in 2007 and selected for the 2010 FringeNYC this August, Veritas is the tragic story of the bright-futured boys whose lives fell prey to a family's desire for revenge and an august institution's reckless pursuit of the Truth.

Playwright Stan Richardson is from St. Louis, Missouri living in New York City since 1995. His plays, which include Veritas, The Tale of the Good Whistleblower of Chaillot's Caucasian Mother and Her Other Children of a Lesser Marriage Chalk Circle (with composer Rachel Peters), The Children (with composer HAl Goldberg), wHormone and All the World's Problems, have received workshop productions and readings at such venues as Second Stage, Ars Nova, Classic Stage Company, Dixon Place, PS122, The Brick Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. His play, Another Brief Encounter, was published in Plays & Playwrights 2007, available at bookstores and at NYTE.com. An alumnus of NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Edward Albee's Playwrights' Workshop, and a former resident of Albee's "Barn," Stan is a contributor to nytheatre.com and a proud member of The Dramatists Guild of America.

Event Details: Veritas, May 25th at 8PM, LGBT Community Center, Room 301, 208 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011. Tickets are now on-sale for $20/General Admission, $50/VIP and available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111403. All profits benefit Lambda Legal. More information at http://www.veritastheplay.com.

Veritas Credits: Written by Stan Richardson, Directed by Ryan J. Davis, Music By Rachel Peters, Casting Director Daryl Eisenberg, Stage Manager Corey Phillips. Featuring Tate Ellington, Mitch Dean, Matt Steiner & Adam J. Thompson. Full casting announced next week.

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