Heartland Theatre Announces Cast for Douglas Post's EARTH AND SKY

Director Don LaCasse has announced his cast for the next show on Heartland Theatre's schedule, Chicago playwright Douglas Post's neo-noir thriller Earth and Sky. LaCasse's cast includes Karen Hazen, Richard Jensen and Dean Brown, all of whom appeared in Middletown, Heartland's last show of last season, along with Colleen Longo and Harold Chapman, who were in Time Stands Still last winter, as well as Dave Lemmon, Todd Wineburner, Michelle Kaiden and Kevin Paul Wickart.

Post's play involves Sara McKeon, a poet and librarian, who is told that David, the man she loves, is not at all what she believed. Instead, detectives Kersnowski and Weber paint a picture of a career criminal, someone involved in rape and murder. Sara doesn't believe them. How can she? But how can she distrust information that comes straight from the police?

Her journey to uncover the truth takes her into her own past with David as well as the present without him, as she is thrown into an urban landscape populated with liars, thieves and unreliable witnesses. Ultimately, Sara must decide what and who she can trust in a world turned upside-down.

For Heartland, Karen Hazen will play Sara, while Richard Jensen will take the role of David, who once seemed to be the perfect man but now is transformed into something very different. Harold Chapman and Dave Lemmon have been cast as the two policemen who drop the bomb into Sara's life, with Colleen Longo as a librarian colleague of Sara's and Dean Brown, Todd Wineburner, Michelle Kaiden and Kevin Paul Wickart as the shadowy characters Sara questions and encounters in her search for the truth. 

Performances of Earth and Sky begin September 12 and continue through the 29th. For information on the play, click here or here. To see the schedule of performances, click here.

Will Eno's MIDDLETOWN Opens Tomorrow Night at Heartland

There are always a few "it boys" in current American playwriting, and right now, the eccentric and poetic Will Eno definitely hits the list. Eno emerged onto the national theatre scene with Thom Pain (based on nothing), a one-man show that enjoyed a sold-out run at the 2004 International Edinburgh Festival, where it won the First Fringe Award, among others, and then took New York by storm with a year of off-Broadway performances. Thom Paine was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Flu Season received the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for the best debut production in New York by an American playwright, and his newest work, Gnit, an updated and irreverent adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, was a mainstage selection for the recent Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, in a production directed by Actors Theatre Artistic Director Les Waters.

Yep. It Boy.

It helps that Eno's writing is singular and different, with its own rhythms and warped sense of humor. Middletown, the deceptively sweet play about life in Anytown USA that preceded Gnit, received the Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play in 2010. It has that Eno touch, making it sound and feel distinctly different from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, for example, a play Middletown has been widely compared to. Both plays deal with ordinary people living ordinary lives in an ordinary town, and both touch on life and death. But while Our Town shows us life and death, Middletown is more about the time and space in between, about the middle, about regular old people finding a way to mind that gap.

John Kirk, who is directing Middletown for Heartland Theatre, writes that Eno's characters "are trapped in 'the space between' their birth and their death. The title Middletown...suggests the dilemma of characters who are stuck in the middle of themselves and have not found a way out."

Karen Hazen (left) and Rhys Lovell appear in Heartland's Middletown

The characters in the play range from John Dodge, a handyman type who is between jobs but has lived in Middletown for a while, and Mary Swanson, who just moved there with her husband to start a family, to a cop, a librarian, a mechanic, doctors, and even a couple of tourists who come to see what this town is all about. For Heartland, Rhys Lovell will play John, and Karen Hazen will play Mary, with Lynna Briggs, Dean Brown, Aric Diamani, George Freeman, Megan Huff, Richard Jensen, Kathleen Kirk, Devon Lovell, John Poling and Ann White filling out all the other roles in the everyday tableau that is Middletown.

Performances begin tomorrow night with a special Pay What You Can preview at 7:30 pm, with shows continuing Thursdays through Sundays till May 5. For details on times and dates of performances, click here. To see reservation information, click here.