Tony Award winners Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley will join Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the limited season repertoire of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Directed by Sean Mathias, the performances will begin Saturday, October 26th at the Cort Theatre on Broadway.
This limited season will run for 14 weeks only.
Waiting for Godot played a critically acclaimed, sold-out run in London’s West End in 2009 with McKellen and Stewart. Prior to Broadway, No Man’s Land will play a brief engagement at Berkeley Rep August 3 through 31, 2013 with McKellen, Stewart, Crudup and Hensley.
Billy Crudup won a Tony Award for The Coast of Utopia. Shuler Hensley won a Tony Award for Oklahoma!. Ian McKellen made his Broadway debut in Arbuzov’s The Promise in 1967 and won the Tony Award for his performance in Amadeus in 1981. Patrick Stewart first appeared on Broadway in Peter Brook’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1971 and won the Drama Desk Award for A Christmas Carol in 1992. McKellen and Stewart have appeared together on stage once before. In 1977 they performed in the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Both McKellen and Stewart have received knighthoods for their services to drama and the performing arts. These 4 acclaimed actors return to Broadway playing in a rotating schedule of two of the most iconic plays of the 20th Century.
In Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land we wonder if two writers, Hirst (Stewart) and Spooner (McKellen) really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity – and the comedy – intensify with the arrival of two other men, Briggs (Hensley) and Foster (Crudup). Do all four inhabit a no-man’s-land between the present and time remembered, between reality and fantasy? No Man’s Land was first produced in 1975 by the National Theatre in London with John Gielgud playing Spooner and Ralph Richardson as Hirst. No Man’s Land debuted on Broadway a year later.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot follows two consecutive days in the lives of Vladimir (Stewart) and Estragon (McKellen), who divert themselves by clowning around, joking and arguing, while waiting expectantly and unsuccessfully for the mysterious Godot. While they are waiting, two strangers appear: Pozzo (Hensley) and Lucky (Crudup). Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris in 1953, followed by London in 1955 and eventually opened in New York in 1956.
Rehearsals will begin this July.
