The Public Theater

The Public Theater and Theatre for a New Audience Present
The Wallace Shawn - André Gregory Project
A Theatrical Event Celebrating The 40-Year Collaboration Between Wallace Shawn and André Gregory

A co-production with Theatre for a New Audience, THE WALLACE SHAWN-ANDRÉ GREGORY PROJECT is a celebration of a remarkable theatrical collaboration. Wallace Shawn is one of America’s most significant playwrights, long overdue for a major retrospective. André Gregory, his My Dinner with André co-star, has been directing Shawn’s plays for 40 years, and as part of this retrospective, he directs Shawn’s two most recent plays; the first New York revival of the acclaimed masterwork THE DESIGNATED MOURNER and the American premiere of the profoundly provocative GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLORS. Shawn is a multifaceted figure: an internationally famous character actor as well as an incomparably courageous playwright whom critics have placed in the first rank of contemporary dramatists. Gregory is the acclaimed director who has brought his most challenging works to fruition, including Our Late Night, Shawn’s first play in New York City which was presented at The Public Theater in 1975.

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER
Written by Wallace Shawn
Directed by André Gregory
Featuring Deborah Eisenberg, Larry Pine and Wallace Shawn
June 21 - August 25, 2013

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER is a monologue-triptych in which three artist-intellectuals recount their experiences as their once-liberal country sinks into political crisis. A famous poet-intellectual, his daughter, and her husband—people made of very different moral fiber despite their shared highbrow interests—witness the subtle and flagrant transformations of everyday life, public affairs and personal relationships until they finally are dragged into the middle of things themselves. This searing and disturbing drama, prescient of much that occurred during the Bush/Obama years, has been called Shawn’s masterpiece.

American Premiere
GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLORS
Written by Wallace Shawn
Directed by André Gregory
Featuring Julie Hagerty, Emily McDonnell, Wallace Shawn, and Jennifer Tilly
October 8 - November 10, 2013

Shawn’s most outlandish work to date, GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLORS, is a disturbing and anomalously beautiful play that explores the role of human beings in nature and the role of nature in human beings, sexuality being as Shawn says, “nature’s most obvious footprint in the human soul.” The play’s central character is a doctor who believes he has solved world hunger when he figures out how to rejigger the metabolisms of animals to tolerate eating their own kind. This has unexpected consequences. The play tells a story about the doctor, his wife, and his lovers, that is also a story about human beings and animals and the planet we live on.