World Premiere

By Adam Rapp
Directed by Neil Pepe

JOIN NOW AND SEE IT FOR $35!

“AN EXTRAORDINARY, UNSETTLING NEW PLAY! A PITCH PERFECT CAST! Adam Rapp’s new play is likely to linger with you, like a fever dream whose impact quietly expands in the hours after you’ve left the theater. I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN A SECOND OF IT!”
Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg News

“CHRISTINE LAHTI GIVES A SHARP-CLAWED AND WITTY PERFORMANCE!. Reed Birney performs with his usual painstaking sensitivity and Cotter Smith is perfect as the impeccable, blue-blazered Dirk.”
Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“THOROUGHLY ENJOYABLE! Dreams of Flying has a great time covering the classics - adultery, exigency, barely suppressed madness and hysteria!"
Scott Brown, New York Magazine

“FUNNY, BIZARRE AND ENTERTAINING! A dinner-party-gone-awry, Adam Rapp style. A sampling fo the latter: wild explicit sex among the dinner dishes and the threat of varuious deaths. All before dessert."
Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press

“ADAM RAPP WRITES FUNNY LINES FOR SCARY PEOPLE. That’s not a shabby talent and it’s on smart display in Neil Pepe’s slickly helmed production.”
Marilyn Stasio, Variety

“BRAZENLY BIZARRE! Like Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie transposed to the land of Brooks Brothers and Rolex watches."
Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post

Dr. Bertram and Sandra Cabot invite long time friends Dirk and Celeste Von Stofenberg to their beautiful Connecticut Gold Coast home in honor of James, the Von Stofenberg’s only son, who has recently been released from an esteemed private psychiatric hospital.

The feast promises to be delicious, but when Sandra enlists Dirk to help her change the course of her life, the sky turns a strange color, Canadian geese start crashing into the bay window, and the fate of the evening tilts toward an inevitable conclusion that promises to change the lives of all who came to the table.

BIOS

ADAM RAPP (Playwright) is an Obie-award-winning playwright and director. He is the author of numerous plays, which include Nocturne (American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop), Faster (Rattlestick), Animals & Plants (A.R.T.), Finer Noble Gases (26th Humana Festival, Rattlestick), Stone Cold Dead Serious (A.R.T., Edge Theatre), Blackbird (The Bush, London; Edge Theatre), Gompers, (Pittsburgh City Theatre), Essential Self-Defense (Playwrights Horizons/Edge Theatre), American Sligo (Rattlestick), Bingo with the Indians (The Flea), Kindness (Playwrights Horizons), and Red Light Winter (Steppenwolf, Scott Rudin Productions at Barrow Street Theatre), which won Chicago’s Jeff Award for Best New Work, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Recent world premieres include The Metal Children (The Vineyard Theatre), The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick), and The Edge of Our Bodies (35th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays). He has published seven novels for young adults, including The Buffalo Tree (Front Street Books, 1997), Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (Candlewick Press, 2006), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and Punkzilla (Candlewick Press, 2009), which was named a 2010 Michael J. Printz Honor Book. He is also the author of the adult novel, The Year Of Endless Sorrows (Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2006), and the graphic novel, Ball-Peen Hammer (First Second Books, 2009). He also wrote and directed the feature films Winter Passing, and Blackbird, which he adapted from his play. After the New Year he will direct the film version of Red Light Winter, for Scott Rudin and Parts and Labor Productions. His new novel, The Children and the Wolves, is forthcoming from Candlewick Press in February. His playwriting honors include Boston’s Elliot Norton Award, The Helen Merrill Prize, The 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a Lucille Lortel Playwright’s Fellowship, and The Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

NEIL PEPE (Director). Neil most recently directed David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre on Broadway with Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight. Prior to that, he made his Broadway debut with the acclaimed hit revival of Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Atlantic productions include Ethan Coen’s Almost an Evening and Offices, David Mamet’s Keep Your Pantheon and School (also Center Theatre Group LA); David Pittu’s What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling; David Mamet’s American Buffalo starring William H. Macy (also Donmar Warehouse, London); Harold Pinter’s Celebration and The Room; David Mamet’s Romance (also Mark Taper Forum, L.A.);Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, The Night Heron and Parlour Song; Milos by John Guare; Tom Donaghy’s The Beginning of August (also South Coast Rep.); Howard Korder’s Sea of Tranquility; Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange; Hilary Bell’s Wolf Lullaby; Edwin Sanchez’s Clean. Other credits include Frank Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses with Martin Sheen and Frances Conroy; Eric Bogosian’s Red Angel (Williamstown Theatre Festival) and Jessica Goldberg’s Refuge (Playwrights Horizons). Artistic Director, Atlantic Theater Company since 1992.

BETSY AIDEM (Celeste) In New York: The Metal Children and Mary Rose at The Vineyard. Crooked (Women’s Project), Celebration and Sea of Tranquility at the Atlantic, Stone Cold Dead Serious (Edge Theater at Chashama), The Triple Happiness (Second Stage), Good Thing (The New Group), The Butterfly Collection (Playwrights’ Horizons), Luminescence Dating (EST), Perapalas (McGinn Cazalle), Steel Magnolias (Lortel), A Lie of the Mind (Promenade), Escape from Happiness (Naked Angels), Five Women Wearing the Same Dress (MCC), Road (Lincoln Center Theater), Balm in Gilead (Circle Rep and Minetta Lane). God of Carnage (George Street Playhouse), Circle Mirror Transformation (Huntington), Sweet Bird of Youth and The Sugar Syndrome at Williamstown, Jolson Sings Again (George Street), 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (ART, Saddlers Wells and European Tour), Seven (International), The Miser (Hartford), Miss Julie (Portland). Platonov, Invanov, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard (Lake Lucille). TV: “Law and Order,” “SVU,” “Criminal Intent,” “Trial by Jury,” “The West Wing,” “Sex and the City,” “The High Life,” “The Good Wife,” “Nurse Jackie,” “Rescue Me.” Film: Margaret, The Bleeding House, Arbitrage, The Oranges, You Can Count on Me, Motherhood, Music of the Heart, Winter Passing. Received the 2007 Obie for Sustained Excellence of Performance.

QUINCY TYLER BERNSTINE (Wilma) New York credits include: Born Bad (Soho Rep), Family Week (MCC), In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (LCT), Ruined (MTC) for which she won an Obie, an Audelco and the Clarence Derwent Award, The Misanthrope (New York Theatre Workshop), Chicken (Studio Dante), A Small, Melodramatic Story (The Public Theater/LAByrinth), �?nami (Partial Comfort Productions), (I am) Nobody’s Lunch, The Ladies, Paris Commune, Gone Missing (all with The Civilians), Matt & Ben (P.S. 122 and National Tour), The Trail of Her Inner Thigh (LAByrinth), among others. She has worked at such regional theaters as The Geffen Playhouse, Intiman, The Goodman, Woolly Mammoth, The O’Neill, Williamstown, Sundance Theatre Institute, Cape Cod Theater Project, Berkeley Rep, The Alliance, Long Wharf, La Jolla Playhouse, Chautauqua Theater Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Nashville Shakespeare Festival, Baltimore Center Stage, Mark Taper Forum, Virginia Stage Company, and others. Television/Film: “Spring/Fall” (HBO Pilot), Rachel Getting Married, HBO Voyeur Project, “Chappelle’s Show,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “All My Children.” She is a graduate of Brown University (BA), UC San Diego (MFA) and is a member of LAByrinth Theater Company and The Civilians.

REED BIRNEY (Bert) received a Special Drama Desk Award last May in recognition of the three plays in which he appeared this past season: A Small Fire at Playwrights’ Horizons and, at the Roundabout Underground, Tigers Be Still and The Dream of the Burning Boy. He was in Annie Baker’s hit Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons. For the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Soho Rep, he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. He was Dr. Sweet in the original New York cast of Bug and played Tony Blair in Stuff Happens at the Public. He has received three OBIEs and a Drama Desk Award. On film, he can be seen in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, Morning Glory with Harrison Ford and Jeff Lipsky’s Twelve Thirty. He has just finished filming Imogene with Annette Benning and Kristin Wiig.

CHRISTINE LAHTI (Sandra) Broadway: God of Carnage, The Heidi Chronicles, Loose Ends, Present Laughter, Scenes and Revelations, Division Street. Off-Broadway: Body of Water, Little Murders (Obie Award), Three Hotels (Drama Desk Nom), Landscape of the Body, The Woods (Theatre World Award). Regional:  Love, Loss, and What I Wore; Third; A Moon for the Misbegotten; Summer and Smoke; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Film: Petunia, Touchback, Flying Lessons, Smart People, Yonkers Joe, Obsessed, Swing Shift (Academy Award nom, NY Film Critics Award, Golden Globe nom), Running on Empty (L.A. Film Critics Award, Golden Globe nom), The Doctor, Housekeeping, Just Between Friends, …And Justice for All, Whose Life Is it Anyway?, Gross Anatomy, Leaving Normal, Funny About Love.  TV:  “The Cleaner,” �?’Law & Order: SVU,’’ �?’The Closer,’’ “Studio 60,” “Ally McBeal,” “Chicago Hope” (Emmy Award, Golden Globe Award), “Jack and Bobby” (Golden Globe nom), “No Place Like Home” (Cable Ace Award,  Golden Globe Award, Emmy nom), “Crazy From The Heart,” “Out of the Ashes,” “The Pilot’s Wife,” “Open House,” “The Book of Ruth,” “Amerika” (Emmy nom, Golden Globe nom), “An American Daughter” (Golden Globe nom).  Directing:  My First Mister (opening night, Sundance Film Festival), “Chicago Hope,” Lieberman in Love (Academy Award).

SHANE McRAE (James) After graduating from the University of Evansville, Shane McRae attended the NYU Graduate Acting program where he received his masters degree. Soon after, he landed his first role in the Tony Award-winning play Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out on Broadway.  His film credits include the independent feature One Small Hitch, The Help with Viola Davis and Emma Stone, Bad Teacher alongside Cameron Diaz, The Adjustment Bureau, Bottleworld, The Collective, Thunder Geniuses, Killer Pad, and All Over Again. His television credits include: “Law & Order: SVU,” “Gossip Girl,” “Numb3rs,” “Medium,” “Cold Case,” “CSI: Miami,” “Law & Order: CI,” “One Life to Live,” and “Hack.” He was also a series regular opposite Seth Green on NBC's “Four Kings.” His theater credits include Fifth of July directed for Bay Street and Williamstown by Terry Kinney, Killer's and Other Family (Rattlestick), Richard III (Public Theatre), Last Dance (Manhattan Theatre Club), and Red Herring (The Connelly Theatre).

COTTER SMITH (Dirk) Broadway: Next Fall, An American Daughter, Burn This. Off-Broadway: Side Effects, Kin, Next Fall (Naked Angels), How I Learned to Drive, The Dying Gaul (Vineyard), Borderlines, EL Salvador, Empty Hearts, Walking the Dead (Circle Rep), A Soldier’s Play (Negro Ensemble), Blood Knot (Roundabout). L.A.: The Tavern (L.A. Drama Critics Award), The Seagull, Endgame, The Homecoming, Mad Forest (Matrix Theatre); How I Learned to Drive, A Soldier’s Play (Mark Taper); Romeo and Juliet (Skylight). National tour: Art. Film: Gods Behaving Badly; X2; You Don’t Know Jack; Burning Blue; Friends with Kids; Lunatics, Lovers and Poets (Best Supporting Actor nom., Method Fest). TV: early days of “Hill Street Blue” to this season’s “White Collar.”

KATHERINE WATERSTON (Cora) NY Theater: The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick); Bachelorette (Second Stage); Reborning (Summer Play Festival); Kindness (Playwrights’ Horizons); Los Angeles (The Flea Theatre); Smashing (The Play Co.). Film: EAT; Taking Woodstock; Orchids; Michael Clayton; The Babysitters; Good Dick. Upcoming Films: The Factory; Almost in Love; Enter Nowhere; Another Bullshit Night in Suck City; The Stare; Robot and Frank; Astarsaga. Upcoming TV: “Becoming Helen Keller.”