I met this guy Lou Harry about a year ago. We were both part of an Annenberg/NEA fellowship where dozens of theater critics spend a fortnight creating a website in L.A. and bombarding the arts scene there with reviews and snarky commentary.
We kept in touch. Lou lives in Indiana, where he’s the Arts Editor for the Indianapolis Business Journal. But he travels a lot, so we’ve met up a couple of times in New York City. This week, I finally get to show him New Haven.
Outside of his arts journalism, Lou’s written many books—trivia books, guides to Kid Culture and Guilty Pleasures, the novelization of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and a novel (The High-Impact Infidelity Diet, co-written with Eric Pfeffinger) which was optioned for the movies.
He’s also a playwright, with a bent for commonplace happenings and understated dialogue about people undergoing interesting transitions in their generally unexceptional lives.
While Lou’s in town, we’re holding a reading of one of his plays, 2 p.m. Saturday July 21 at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., New Haven.
I’ve cast four actors from the New Haven Theater Company—Hilary Brown, Peter Chenot, Hallie Martenson and Steve Scarpa in the lead roles. They’ll be script-in-hand, of course, but we’ll see if we can work out a few little staging ideas.
The play’s called Clutter, and it’s about four formerly frolicsome friends aging past their partyhappy youth, still finding themselves.
We’re hoping this reading really works out so we can do a whole lot more at Institute Library in future. Please come and support new work.