Cathcart, Rich and Kushner Slated to Speak at Guthrie's 2009 Tony Kushner Celebration

Guthrie Director Joe Dowling today announced directors for the three productions slated to headline the theater's 2009 Tony Kushner celebration, in addition to three speaking events designed to expand and enhance the issues raised in the work of this Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.
 
Guthrie veteran director/choreographer Marcela Lorca will helm Caroline, or Change on the Wurtele Thrust Stage, which will run concurrently with Kushner's world premiere commission, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures on the McGuire Proscenium Stage, under the direction of Tony and Drama Desk nominated Michael Greif (Rent, Grey Gardens). Berkeley Rep Artistic Director Tony Taccone will direct tiny Kushner, a collection of Kushner's short plays in the Dowling Studio, which will include Geraldine of Albania Meets Lucia Pamela on the Moon, Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence (which premiered at the Guthrie Lab as part of The Acting Company's 1998 national tour of Love's Fire), East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, Dr. Arnold A. Hutschneker in Paradise, and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Happy.Tickets for all three productions are now through the Guthrie Box Office at 612.377.2224, toll-free 877.44.STAGE and online at www.guthrietheater.org.
 
In addition to these productions, three lead speaking events will help frame the examination and celebration of Kushner's body of work. Former New York Times chief theater critic and current Op-Ed columnist Frank Rich will speak on the intersection of arts, culture and politics from the Wurtele Thrust Stage on Monday, May 11 at 7:30 p.m as a Guthrie Global VoicE. Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin M. Cathcart will offer two In Conversation events in the Dowling Studio, on Saturday, May 23 at 1 p.m. and Sunday, May 24 at 7 p.m., discussing the movement to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people with HIV. The speaker series will conclude with the highly anticipated Global Voice presentation from celebration honoree Tony Kushner on Monday, June 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wurtele Thrust Stage.
 
Global Voice: Frank Rich
$15, $25 and $35
 
In Conversation: Kevin M. Cathcart
$15
 
Global Voice: Tony Kushner
$20, $30 and $40
 
Tickets for all three speaking events go on sale Monday, October 20 through the Guthrie Box Office at 612.377.2224, toll-free 877.44.STAGE and online at www.guthrietheater.org.
 
The productions and speakers will join a series of other special events, including an expanded partnership with the University of Minnesota, to present the local, national and international community with opportunities to expand and enhance their understanding of and appreciation for the many issues raised in Kushner's work.
 
About the Kushner Celebration Directors
 
Marcela Lorca earned critical raves for her 2008 Guthrie production of Thomas Kilroy's The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. Her choreography has been seen in more than 30 Guthrie Productions, in addition to directing productions for the Guthrie Experience for Young Actors in Training, and the Guthrie's 2001 production of Blood Wedding. She has directed and choreographed productions for theaters across the country, including the Juilliard Drama School, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Shakespeare Theatre, the Goodman Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Lorca currently serves as the head of movement for the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater B.F.A. Actor Training Program.
 
Michael Greif was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for Grey Gardens at Playwrights Horizons, with other Broadway credits including Jonathan Larson's Rent (Tony nomination) and Never Gonna Dance. Recent directing work includes Diana Son's Satellites (Public), John Guare's Landscape of the Body (Signature), Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade (Roundabout) and Nilo Cruz's Beauty of the Father (Manhattan Theatre Club). He has directed extensively for the New York Shakespeare Festival, including Suzan-Lori Parks' f-ing A, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Jose Rivera's Marisol, Connie Congdon's Casanova, Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day and Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. As artistic associate for the New York Theatre Workshop, Greif directed Kate Ryan's adaptation of Cavedweller and Paul Scott Goodman's Bright Lights, Big City and Rent. Off-Broadway, he has also directed Neal Bell's Spatter Pattern (Playwrights Horizons), LaBute's The Distance From Here (MCC Theater), Betty Rules (Zipper), Guare's A Few Stout Individuals (Signature) and Bell's Monster (Classic Stage Company). Regionally, he served as artistic director for La Jolla Playhouse (1995-1997), directing Our Town, Sweet Bird of Youth, Don's Boy, Randy Newman's Faust (also Goodman), Kushner's Slavs (also Taper) and Bell's adaptation of Thérèse Raquin, and has directed at Williamstown, including Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime, Rice's Street Scene, Coward's Tonight at 8:30, and Chekhov's The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard.
 
Tony Taccone is in his 12th year as artistic director of Berkeley Rep, where he has staged more than 35 shows, including world premieres by Culture Clash, Rinde Eckert, David Edgar, Danny Hoch, Geoff Hoyle, Quincy Long and Itamar Moses. Taccone recently made his Broadway debut with Bridge & Tunnel, which was universally lauded by critics and won a Tony Award for its star, Sarah Jones. He also staged the show's record-breaking off-Broadway run, workshopped it for Broadway at Berkeley Rep and directEd Jones' previous hit, Surface Transit. He commissioned Tony Kushner's legendary Angels in America, co-directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum and has collaborated with Kushner on six projects. Their latest piece, Brundibár, featured designs by beloved children's author Maurice Sendak. It debuted at Berkeley Rep and then traveled to Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven and the New Victory Theatre in New York City, where it sold out its run and was nominated for two Drama Desk Awards. In 2004, his production of David Edgar's Continental Divide transferred to the Barbican in London after playing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse and England's Birmingham Rep. Taccone frequently works at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he has also directed Coriolanus, Othello, Pentecost and the American premiere of Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy. At present, he has two hit shows touring the nation: Danny Hoch's Taking Over and Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. His regional credits include Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arizona Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre and San Francisco's Eureka Theatre, where he served six years as artistic director before going to Berkeley Rep. Taccone has served on the faculty at UC Berkeley, sat on the board of Theatre Communications Group and acted as a regional representative for the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.
 
About the Kushner Celebration Speakers
 
In "After Angels," a profile of Tony Kushner published in The New Yorker, John Lahr wrote: "[Kushner] is fond of quoting Melville's heroic prayer from Mardi and Voyage Thither ("Better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals"), and takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history – among them, AIDS and the conservative counter-revolution (Angels in America), Afghanistan and the West (Homebody/Kabul), German Fascism and Reaganism (A Bright Room Called Day), the rise of capitalism (Hydriotaphia, or the Death of DR. Browne), and racism and the civil rights movement in the South (Caroline, or Change).  But his plays, which are invariably political, are rarely polemical.  Instead Kushner rejects ideology in favor of what he calls "a dialectically shaped truth," which must be "outrageously funny" and "absolutely agonizing," and must "move us forward."  He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances – a drag queen dying of AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans – and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized – a humanizing act of the imagination."

Born in New York City in 1956 and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.  His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Hydriotaphia; Homebody/Kabul; and Caroline, or Change, a musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori.  Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the English-language libretto for the children's opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels in America, and Steven Spielberg's Munich. His books include But the Giraffe, a Curtain Raising, and Brundibar: the Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
 
Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, among many others.  Most recently, Caroline, or Change, produced in the autumn of 2006 at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, received the Evening Standard Award, the London Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Olivier Award for Best Musical. In September 2008, Tony Kushner became the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the largest theater award in the US. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock.  He is currently working on a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln.  He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris. 
 
Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist of The New York Times, where his weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded Sunday Week in Review opinion pages introduced by the paper in April 2005. Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page. His articles, columns and books, including the blistering criticism of post-9/11 Bush administration policies in his controversial 2006 book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, draw from Rich's background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics. His childhood memoir, Ghost Light, was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. A collection of Mr. Rich's drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, was published by Random House in October 1998. His book, The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987. Rich remains a constant champion of new American Playwrights, including Kushner, and was honored in 2007 by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) as Outstanding Newspaper Columnist.
 
Kevin M. Cathcart, executive director or Lambda Legal, is a leading strategist and spokesperson in the movement to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people with HIV. Cathcart has made Lambda Legal an unparalleled national force through its far-reaching litigation and public education. Under his leadership, Lambda Legal promotes security, respect and fairness for lesbian and gay youth, families, and all people regardless of sexual orientation or HIV status. Lambda Legal's groundbreaking work reached new heights in 2003 when it won a U.S. Supreme Court victory striking down Texas' "Homosexual Conduct" law and every law like it in the nation. Lambda Legal was lead counsel in the case, representing two men who were arrested in Houston while having consensual sex at home. The landmark ruling continues to impact all areas of LGBT people's lives, and Cathcart has mapped out a wide-ranging strategy for Lambda Legal to turn its historic court victory into a reality in people's everyday lives. Other unique programs begun during Cathcart's tenure include Lambda Legal's Foster Care Initiative to improve care of lesbian and gay youth in foster care, whose needs go largely unmet throughout the country. With its Marriage Project, Lambda Legal plays a leading role in a national coalition working to win the freedom to marry.
 
About the Guthrie
The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963, is an American center for theater performance, production, education and professional training. The Guthrie is dedicated to producing the great works of dramatic literature, developing the work of contemporary playwrights and cultivating the next generation of theater artists. Led by Director Joe Dowling since 1995, the Guthrie opened their new three-theater home on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in June 2006.
 
The Guthrie is located at 818 South 2nd Street (at Chicago Avenue), in downtown Minneapolis. To purchase tickets or season subscriptions call the Guthrie Box Office between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. daily at 612.377.2224 or toll-free 877.44.STAGE. For more information, or to purchase tickets online, visit www.guthrietheater.org.

Photo Credit Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

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