Richards ’69: Busy on Broadway This Fall

Six-time Tony Award winner Jeffrey Richards ’69 is co-producing three exciting productions on Broadway this fall season.

First up is a new revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which begins previews on Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012 and opens on Saturday, Oct. 13 at the Booth Theatre (222 West 45th Street), exactly 50 years to the day of the play’s original opening. This alternately hilarious and devastating dissection of marriage and grief, directed by Tony Award nominee Pam MacKinnon (Clybourne Park), features Tracy Letts and Amy Morton—the playwright and the star of the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning smash hit August: Osage County—as George and Martha, one of theater’s most notoriously dysfunctional couples.

This acclaimed production originally ran at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company last winter before transferring to Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage last spring.

In a review of this production in the Chicago Sun-Times, Hedy Weiss wrote: “I defy any onlooker to the electrifying, often revelatory revival of this American classic—now in a Steppenwolf Theatre production that is sure to make history—to shield their eyes or ears from the ensuing massacre. Thanks to the most meticulous, probing, scalpel-like direction by Pam MacKinnon, and the galvanic yet gorgeously calibrated performances of Tracy Letts and Amy Morton as George and Martha, this enthralling take on Albee’s play makes you feel like an embedded reporter in a harrowing living-room war.”

Richards also is a co-producer of the 30th anniversary production of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, which begins previews on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 and opens on Sunday, November 11 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre (236 West 45th Street). The exemplary cast includes Oscar Award- and Tony Award-winner Al Pacino, Emmy Award-winner Bobby Cannavale (TV’s Boardwalk Empire), David Harbour, Richard Schiff (TV’s The West Wing), Jeremy Shamos (Clybourne Park), and John C. McGinley (TV’s Scrubs), under the direction of Tony Award-awinner Daniel Sullivan (The Merchant of Venice, Proof).

The play deals with the lives of four Chicago real estate agents whose jobs are on the line and are willing to do anything, however unethical, to close a deal. Mamet himself worked in a real estate office in Chicago in 1969 setting up appointments for salesmen, and his play is inspired by some of the cutthroat politics he witnessed.

Richards’ third production this fall is the world premiere of The Anarchist, a provocative new play by David Mamet, which begins previews on Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012 and opens on Sunday, Dec. 11 at the Golden Theatre (252 West 45th Street). Set in a female penitentiary, the work features two-time Tony Award winner Patti LuPone (Evita, Gypsy) as a longtime inmate with ties to a violent political organization, who pleads for parole from a warden committed to having her stay in jail, played by Debra Winger (Wesleyan parent ’09). Winger is making her Broadway debut and is best known for her Oscar nominated performances in the films Terms of Endearment, Shadowlands, and An Officer and a Gentleman. Mamet will direct his own play.

For tickets to these plays, contact Telecharge at 212-239-6200 or 1-800-432-7250 outside the New York metro area.