LAFPI

The Moss Hart & Kitty Carlisle Hart New Play Initiative  ‘Silver Medallion’ winners, Suzanne Bradbeer’s Confederates and Wendy Graf’s Exit Wounds, are playing in repertory at GTC Burbank, and vying to win an off-Broadway premiere at NYC’s 59E59 Theaters next spring.

Hart NPI artistic director Christopher Hart will direct both plays.

The Moss Hart & Kitty Carlisle Hart New Play Initiative is unique because it offers writers fully staged productions on both coasts for a truly national impact. Out of 1,243 submitted scripts, four were selected as Bronze winners and received readings last summer at 59E59 Theaters in New York. Of those, Confederates and Exit Wounds were selected to receive full productions at Grove Theater Center, and one will return to premiere at 59E59 next year.

The Los Angeles premiere of Confederates is an often funny, often devastating look at today’s high stakes political media landscape. Melissa R. Randel (original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line, co-chair of Theater Arts at Glendale Community College) stars as a seasoned, embedded reporter on the road with a newly declared presidential candidate. When her young and ambitious colleague (Daryl C. Brown – Master Harold…and the Boys at Portland Stage Company, recurring roles on Days of our Lives and The Young and the Restless) uncovers a compromising photo of the candidate’s teenage daughter (Miranda Lichtman, a recent graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts), the two must decide whether to publish or bury it. Confederates was workshopped at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto and at the Lark Play Development Center and LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York City before receiving its world premiere at TheatreWorks in a production that was nominated for seven Bay Area Critics Circle awards; the play was also nominated for the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and it received honorable mentions from the Kilroys two years in a row. TheSan Francisco Chronicle called it “part comedy, part thriller and part morality play.”

The world premiere of Wendy Graf’s Exit Wounds explores the effects of a national tragedy on three generations of the perpetrator’s family. How do you find redemption when someone you love has committed a terrible crime? A story of healing, hope and compassion, Exit Wounds unravels slowly, as a mystery: what was the tragic event that caused hoarder Linda Sadowski (Suanne Spoke, seen in Athol Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek at the Fountain, recurring roles on General Hospital and Switched at Birth, and films including Whiplash and upcoming festival award-winner Wild Prairie Rose) to retreat from life, and her son, Matt (Marshall McCabe – Showpony and Graf’s Unemployed Elephants at the Victory) to become estranged? How can Linda stem the ripple effect of the family’s painful past and save the 17-year-old grandson (Dor Gvirtsman –The Chosen at the Fountain) she’s never met?

Confederates by Suzanne Bradbeer opens on Friday, Nov. 9, and Exit Wounds byWendy Graf opens on Friday, Nov. 16, with both plays running in repertory. To find a schedule of which play performs when, visit www.hartnpi.org. Preview performances take place on Sunday Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. and Thursday, Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. (Confederates), and on Sunday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. and Thursday, Nov. 15 at 8 p.m. (Exit Wounds).

For more info, go to www.hartnpi.org.
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