Staged Readings

An HB Studio Staged Reading

Playwright: James Ryan

Director:

Cast:

The Young Girl and the Monsoon was performed during the 1994-1995 season

Synopsis: Growing up is hard to do particularly if you are a pre-adolescent girl in Manhattan living with a photo-journalist father reeling from a messy divorce. Constance is a thirteen-year-old torn by life and stretched between parents, struggling through those daunting rites of passage which none of us finds easy. Things aren’t all smooth-sailing for her father, Hank, thirty-nine, who is attempting to provide an anchor for Constance, while also working to get his own life into some kind of order, especially regarding his recent serious relationship with a younger woman, Erin, twenty-six. If Constance has only Hank for guidance, then Hank only has Giovanna, thirty-eight, a tempestuous colleague and genuine friend, with whom Hank has an off and on (chiefly off) affair. This romantic comedy turns on Hank’s efforts to find enough room in his life for both Constance and Erin, and achieve the balance and maturity that have, so far, eluded him.”

An HB Studio Staged Reading

Playwright: Rick Lieberman 

Director: Susan Einhorn

Cast: Larry Block, Arthur Francesco, Peter Smith

Set: Ray Recht Lighting: Chris Dallos Costume: Muriel Stockdale Sound: Robert Auld Production Stage Manager: Vienna Hagen Technical Director: Carlo Adinolfi Fight Choreographer: Ian Marshall Assistant Set Designer: Andris Krumkalns Assistant to the Director: Tony Martinez Assistant Stage Manager: Julie Cook House Managers: Trudy Steibl, David Adams, Glen Berman, Danette Pachtner, Gregory Pilot, Stephanie Sundine

Left on Flatbush was performed May 11th – 12th, 16th – 19th, 21st – 26th

An HB Studio Staged Reading

Playwright: Sam Shepard

Director:

Cast:

Geography of a Horse Dreamer was performed during the 1994-1995 season

Synopsis: Betsy sings, Jeremy plays, and Josh watches in this play about love, lies and piano teaching. Jeremy, a young musician who tutors spoiled, rich kids to make ends meet, tells his friend Josh that a student’s mother, a third rate junior miss Ann Bancroft straight out of ‘The Graduate’, is being suggestive. Josh is a former musician who has become a sedentary voyeur with a torch of his own. Envious of Jeremy’s domestic bliss with Betsy, he urges Jeremy to go forward with the encounter. Betsy, a proof reader by day and a jazz singer by night, is waking up to her husband’s and her own restiveness when a smooth record producer offers her a ticket to hear Koko Taylor at the Blue Note while offering Jeremy a trip to the west coast for sound track auditions. Josh, left to protect Betsy against Zev the wolf, suffers a conflict of passion of his own.

An HB Staged Reading

Playwright: David Dresser

Director:

Below the Belt was performed during 1994-1995 season

Synopsis: Judd Hirsch starred in this hilarious Off Broadway comedy set in a soulless corporate world. Dobbitt has been posted to a dismal, distant place, a grim industrial compound that uncomfortably resembles a prison where his quarters have bunks (one freezing cold and the other boiling hot), a table, and an ancient typewriter. He is a checker; he checks though he has no idea what is being made with an irascible coworker who has been in this place for years. Their inept boss possesses a singular talent for fomenting dissent. The comic interplay among these men, one bullying and truculent, one ambitious and evasive, and the third a trembling mass of insecurity and arrogance, is irresistibly funny. As they comically maneuver in their pointless quest for status, sinister little animals encroach on the compound.