Concert Reading of The Cocktail Hour by A.R. Gurney

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Starring Harris Yulin, Mercedes Ruehl, Darren Goldstein, and Elizabeth Marvel.

The time – the mid ’70s. The place – upstate New York. Young playwright John returns to his family’s house, seeking permission to produce the play he has written about his family. As martinis flow, so do recriminations and revelations. One of Gurney’s funniest and most poignant plays.

  • Harris Yulin

    After studying in Los Angeles with the splendid, black-listed actor Jeff Corey, Yulin spent 20 months living in Europe and Israel, dubbing films into English, and performing a night club show with William Burroughs at the Club Montparnasse in Paris.

    He made his New York debut in 1963 in James Saunders’ Next Time I’ll Sing To You, with James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons at the Phoenix Theatre. Many plays, Broadway, off-Broadway and elsewhere followed.

    Recent appearances: Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Court Theatre, Chicago; Death of a Salesman at the Gate Theatre, Dublin; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Chautauqua Festival, and ever trying to get it right, his third try at Claudius in Hamlet at the Classic Stage Company in New York.

    He has appeared in and presented many evenings at Guild Hall including the initial production after the renovation in 2009, The Glass Menagerie with Amy Irving, and last September Are You Now or Have You Ever Been.

    His production of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful with Lois Smith and Hallie Foote played an extended run at the Signature Theatre in New York, receiving four Lucille Lortel Awards (Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Featured Actress, Outstanding Production, Outstanding Director), and subsequently moved to The Goodman Theatre, Chicago.

    His first film was in 1968, an adaptation by Terry Southern of John Barth’s End of The Road, directed by Adam Avakian with longtime friends James Earl Jones and Stacy Keach. Other fondly remembered but not necessarily widely seen efforts include Candy Mountain directed by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer; Short History of Decay script by Michael Maren; 75% In July by Hyatt Bass; and more widely seen production including Clear and Present Danger directed by Philip Noyce; and Scarface directed by Brian de Palma.

    He has many TV appearances including WIOU, about a CBS newsroom where he played a troubled anchorman; and Mister Sterling, set in the U.S. Senate, written by Lawrence O’Donnell.

    He has taught, acted and directed at the Juilliard School for ten years.

    He has narrated many films for PBS and others and done extensive work on radio including dramatizations of Ross MacDonald detective novels with casts of fifty subsequently released as audio books as was Norman Mailer’s last novel, The Castle and
    the Rock.

    He has worked in all the venues and mediums available to him, even singing and dancing in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, in which his efforts in these disciplines were properly third-rate.

  • Mercedes Ruehl

    Mercedes Ruehl has appeared in the films The Fisher King (Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Los Angeles and Chicago Film Critics Association Awards), Married to the Mob, The Warriors, Big, Heartburn, Slaves of New York, Another You, Last Action Hero, Lost in Yonkers, What’s Cooking?, The Amati Girls, Roseanna’s Grave, Chu and Blossom, Zedya and the Hitman, Spooky House, More Dogs Than Bones, and The Minus Man. She has been seen on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Lost in Younkers (Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Helen Hayes Awards), The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Outer Critics Circle Award, Tony nomination), The Rose Tattoo, The Shadow Box (Tony nomination), and I’m Not Rappaport. Her Off Broadway credits include Woman Before a Glass (Obie Award), Other People’s Money (Clarence Derwent Award), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), Coming of Age in Soho, The Vagina Monologues, and Edward Albee’s The Occupant. Ruehl’s television credits include HBO’s Indictment: The McMartin Trial, Gia, Hallmark Hall of Fame’s The Lost Child and Loving Leah, El Jefe, Doubt, Star Spangled Banners, Showtime’s North Shore Fish, Guilt by Association, and A Girl Like Me. She also made guest appearances on Entourage, Law & Order, Monday Mornings, Luck, Psych, and Frasier, among others.

  • Darren Goldstein

    Broadway: Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes; Bloody, Bloody, Andrew Jackson. Off-Broadway: Continuity, & The Madrid (Manhattan Theater Club), The New Group: Rasheeda Speaking, The Good Mother, Abigail's Party (Lortel Nom. Featured Actor), Mouth to Mouth, & Terrorism. Oohrah! (Atlantic Theater), Mary Rose (The Vineyard), Gutenberg! The Musical (Actor's Playhouse), Regional: The Forgotten Woman, (Bay St. Theater) Beyond Therapy (Williamstown/Bay St. Theatre). Film: Paterno, Detroit, The Girl on the Train, Limitless, TV: Charles Wilkes on Ozark, Oscar Hodges on The Affair, Inside Amy Schumer, Nurse Jackie, Blue Bloods, Bull, Blindspot, L&O:SVU, The Gifted, Damages, American Odyssey, MFA from NYU's Graduate Acting Program.

  • Elizabeth Marvel

    American stage and screen actor Elizabeth Marvel can currently be seen on HBO in Native Son, adapted by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. The film was the first sale at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Additionally, Elizabeth can be seen every night playing  ‘Goneril’ in the Scott Rudin produced Broadway revival of King Lear starring Glenda Jackson.  

    In the Fall, Elizabeth will appear in the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, produced by Katie Couric which is based on The Marshall Project and ProPublica Pulitzer Prize-winning article, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.”  She also recently completed shooting the independent films  All The Little Things We Kill, directed by Adam Neutzsky-Wulff and Swallow, Executive Produced by Joe Wright which will debut at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Previously, Elizabeth co-starred  in Nicole Holofcener’s The Land of Steady Habits opposite Ben Mendelsohn and Edie Falco, as well as Noah Baumbach’s highly-lauded The Meyerowitz Stories, for Netflix opposite Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman and Ben Stiller.

    Elizabeth is perhaps best known to television audiences as ‘President Elizabeth Keene’ on the hit Showtime series Homeland and ‘Heather Dunbar’ on the Netflix series House of Cards. Other notable series regular roles include The District for CBS and Lights Out for FX.  She has depicted recurring roles on Manifest, Fargo, Law and Order: SVU, and Person of Interest and has also appeared in episodes of Nurse Jackie, 30 Rock, The Good Wife, The Newsroom, White Collar, and Elementary.

    An integral part of the New York Theater scene, Marvel portrayed ‘Marc Anthony’ in Shakespeare in the Park’s ground-breaking production of Julius Caesar. She has won four Obie Awards for her work Off-Broadway, most notably for her role of ‘Hedda Gabler’ in Ivo Van Hove’s 2004 revival of the play.  She also received a Drama Desk Award Nomination for her performance in Fifty Words. Of Marvel’s numerous Broadway roles, perhaps her most celebrated was that of ‘Brooke Wyeth,’ which she originated in the Off-Broadway production of Other Desert Cities.

    In film, Marvel has had memorable roles in the Coen brothers’ True Grit and Burn After Reading, Spielberg’s Lincoln, Tony Gilroy’s Bourne Legacy, Roger Michell’s Hyde Park on Hudson, J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year and Cameron Crowe's Aloha.

    A graduate of Julliard, Marvel resides in Brooklyn, New York. 

Sponsors

All Theater Programming is supported in part by Ellen Myers, Marders, the Daryl & Steven Roth Foundation, and funding from The Ellen and James S. Marcus Endowment for Musical Programming, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, Hess Philanthropic Fund, The Melville Straus Family Endowment, The Schaffner Family Foundation, and Vital Projects Fund, with additional support from Brown Harris Stevens, Saunders & Associates, and public funds provided by Suffolk County.

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