Members of New Haven Theater Company celebrating the announcement of their May production of Shipwrecked! From left: Hallie Martenson, Christian Shaboo (barechested), Drew Gray (with bottle), Margaret Mann, Hilary Brown, Steve Scarpa (in green plaid shirt), Erich Greene, Peter Chenot (in ski hat) and George Kulp (in tattered shirt).
I ran into playwright Donald Margulies at a Long Wharf Theatre opening night on Tuesday. I was just back from the Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (in Kentucky) and was happy to inform Margulies that his play Dinner With Friends was still among the top two plays immediately mentioned when Humana conversations inevitably turn to well-known works which the festival staged before anyone else. Dinner With Friends was done at Humana in 1998, and is one of three premieres there which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Margulies smiled at the news that his name is still on everyone’s lips at Humana, then told me that a New York revival of Dinner With Friends is in the works, directed by Pam McKinnon, the currently reigning queen of shouty relationship plays (Clybourne Park, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf).
Same night, I got the official word that another Margulies work is being staged here in New Haven shortly.
The New Haven Theater Company, many of whose members work behind-the-scenes at the Long Wharf in marketing and box office positions, is presenting Margulies’ comic drama Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself) on May 12, 18 & 19 (with two performances each day, at 4 & 7 p.m.) at the Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue.
Shipwrecked was produced at Long Wharf Stage II in the spring of 2008, after having had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory Theatre six months earlier. Those, and most other, productions of the play have used a three-person cast, with one male actor playing the hero and two supporting players (one male, one female) playing everybody else. The script doesn’t actually specify that the cast be a threesome, so NHTC is expanding it to a quintet. Christian Shaboo plays Louis, the real-life late-19th-century protagonist of the piece, who’s gotten worldwide publicity for an adventure in which he’d communed with hostile aboroginal tribes and ridden sea turtles. Hilary Brown, Erich Greene, Margaret Mann and Hallie Martenson are the ensemble. Peter Chenot directs, with a production design by Drew Gray. All these folks are stalwart NHTC veterans.
New Haven Theater Company has something in common with the washed-ashore hero of Shipwrecked. The space they used most often in the past few years, a storefront on Court Street, was rented out to a bar and left the company at sea, venue-wise. The Whitney Arts Center is their salvation.
For more info on NHTC, see http://www.newhaventheatercompany.com/
Thanks for posting this, Chris! There is nothing by Donald Margulies that isn’t, at the very least fascinating and in most cases, brilliant. His work is important. Rare. Thanks again!