Guest host Denis O’Hare presents a program that features great two-hander stories, each performed by a pair of actors that bring out the best in them. In “The Trip” by Bruce Jay Friedman, a young man is mortified when his over-the-top mom decides to accompany him to his first day at college. Santino Fontana and Julie Halston have fun with this social nightmare. The stakes are bigger in Lorrie Moore’s “Foes.” A world-weary liberal writer making a reluctant appearance at a charity dinner is seated with a rabid conservative. Kyle MacLachlan and Joan Allen skillfully navigate this delicate minefield.
Artists and writers:
Joan Allen began her New York career off-Broadway in a production of And a Nightingale Sang. Her Broadway credits include Burn This, for which she received a Tony Award for Best Actress, The Heidi Chronicles, Impressionism, and most recently, The Waverly Gallery. She is an original member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has appeared in more than 25 productions, including Balm in Gilead and The Wheel. Allen is a three-time Academy Award nominee, receiving Best Supporting Actress nominations for Nixon and The Crucible, and a Best Actress nomination for The Contender. Additional film credits include Pleasantville, Face/Off, The Notebook, The Ice Storm, The Upside of Anger, The Bourne Identity series, and Room. On television, she is known for her portrayal of Georgia O’Keefe in the 2009 biopic of the same name, and she has had recurring roles in Luck, The Killing, and The Family.
Bruce Jay Friedman has published eight novels, including Stern, A Mother’s Kisses, The Dick, About Harry Towns, The Current Climate, and A Father’s Kisses. His stories have been collected in Black Angels, Let’s Hear It for a Beautiful Guy, and Three Balconies, among other volumes. Friedman edited the landmark anthology Black Humor, published in 1965. His screenwriting credits include Splash, The Lonely Guy, and Stir Crazy. More recently, Friedman published his memoir, Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir, as well as the collection 3.1 Plays.
Santino Fontana is perhaps best known for voicing the character Prince Hans in Disney’s Academy Award-winning animated feature Frozen. Film and television credits include Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Sisters, Shades of Blue, Mozart in the Jungle, the Web series Submissions Only, Off the Menu, Impossible Monsters, and Frozen II. On stage, Fontana won the 2012 Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for his performance in Sons of the Prophet. Additionally, he has starred in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater with Encores!, and on Broadway in 1776, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act One, Billy Elliot, Cinderella, for which he received a Tony nomination, Hello, Dolly!, and Tootsie, for which he received the 2019 Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical.
Julie Halston is known as a “Legend of Off-Broadway” in honor of her extensive career on stage. A founding member of Charles Busch’s company Theatre-in-Limbo, she has performed alongside Busch in numerous productions, including The Divine Sister, Red Scare on Sunset, The Tribute Artist, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Halston’s Broadway credits include Gypsy, Hairspray, Anything Goes, On the Town, and You Can’t Take It with You, for which she was awarded the Richard Seff Award and Tootsie. She has been featured on television in The Class, Sex and the City, Difficult People, Crisis in Six Scenes, and Theater Talk. Halston will appear in the upcoming Broadway adaptation of Tootsie.
Kyle MacLachlan is best known for his leading role as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, for which he won a Golden Globe Award, as well as its prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the 2017 limited series revival. His film and television credits include Dune, Blue Velvet, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, How I Met Your Mother, The Good Wife, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Inside Out, Portlandia, Giant Little Ones, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and the just-released Netflix film directed by Steven Soderbergh, High Flying Bird. He will soon appear in the films Fonzo and Tesla, and the television series Who We Are, Carol's Second Act, and Atlantic Crossing. MacLachlan is also a winemaker, producing in the Walla Walla region of Washington State under the label Pursued by Bear.
Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Like Life, Self-Help, Birds of America, and most recently, Bark. She is also the author of the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Anagrams, and A Gate at the Stairs, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Moore has contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Her work has been honored with the Irish Times International Prize for Literature, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rea Award. Moore is currently the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent work, the essay collection See What Can Be Done, was published in 2018.
Denis O'Hare’s film credits include Garden State, 21 Grams, A Mighty Heart, Michael Clayton, Milk, Duplicity, HBO’s The Normal Heart, Dallas Buyers Club, Lizzie, Danger One, and Late Night. He won a Tony Award for his performance in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out and a Drama Desk Award for his role in Sweet Charity. He is the co-writer, with Lisa Peterson, and star of An Iliad, which was performed at the New York Theatre Workshop and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica; he and Peterson also co-authored a play about the bible, The Good Book, which premiered at the Court Theatre in Chicago. His television credits include American Horror Story, True Blood, The Good Wife, The Comedians, This Is Us, and Big Little Lies. O’Hare’s upcoming projects include The Goldfinch.
