Oscar winner Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan will star in the world premiere of Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane. The play will begin performances on February 15 and open on March 4 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, directed by John Crowley. The first McDonagh play to originate on Broadway (and the first script set in America), A Behanding in Spokane will play a strictly limited engagement of 16 weeks.
Take a man searching for his missing hand (Walken), two con artists out to make a few hundred bucks (Mackie and Kazan) and an overly curious hotel clerk (Rockwell), and the result is A Behanding in Spokane a hilarious black comedy by the author of The Pillowman, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Cripple of Inishmaan.
Walken won the 1978 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Deer Hunter and received a 2002 Oscar nomination for Catch Me If You Can. His more than 50 film credits include Annie Hall, Pennies From Heaven, Biloxi Blues, King of New York, Click, Wedding Crashers, Hairspray, True Romance, Sleepy Hollow and Batman Returns. Trained as a dancer at the Professional Children's School, Walken received the Clarence Derwent Award for the Broadway production of The Lion in Winter, an Obie Award for The Seagull, a Theatre World Award for The Rose Tattoo and the 1997 Susan Stein Shiva Award for his work with Joseph Papp's Public Theater. His most recent Broadway credit was the musical The Dead, and he appeared in the 2001 Central Park production of The Seagull opposite Meryl Streep.
Rockwell’s theater credits include The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Face Divided, Goose-Pimples, The Dumb Waiter and Hot L Baltimore. Films include the upcoming Everybody's Fine and Iron Man 2 as well as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Snow Angels, Welcome to Collinwood, Heist, Charlie's Angels, The Green Mile, Galaxy Quest, Frost/Nixon, Joshua, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Matchstick Men, Celebrity and Last Exit to Brooklyn.
Mackie made his Broadway debut opposite Whoopi Goldberg in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and has appeared on the New York stage in The Seagull, McReele and A Soldier’s Play. He was part of the August Wilson’s 20th Century event at the Kennedy Center and starred in the Shakespeare in the Park production of The Bacchae. Film credits include 8 Mile, She Hate Me, Million Dollar Baby, The Manchurian Candidate, The Man, Brother to Brother, Heavens Fall, We Are Marshall, Half Nelson, Freedomland and Eagle Eye.
Kazan’s Broadway credits include The Seagull and Come Back, Little Sheba. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Things We Want and 100 Saints You Should Know. She plays Meryl Streep’s daughter in the upcoming film comedy It’s Complicated and has appeared in the films Me and Orson Welles, Revolutionary Road, In the Valley of Elah, Fracture, August, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and I Hate Valentine’s Day. Her play Absalom was produced at the 2009 Humana Festival.
The design team for A Behanding in Spokane includes Scott Pask (set and costumes) and Brian MacDevitt (lighting). The play will be produced by Robert Fox.