Tony winners Jefferson Mays and Jennifer Ehle have been tapped to star in the world premiere of J.T. Rogers' Oslo. Tony winner Bartlett Sher directs the Lincoln Center Theater production, which begins performances at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on June 16. Opening night is set for July 11.
The two will play Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, a social scientist and Norwegian diplomat whose efforts culminated in the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. The cast will also include Michael Aronov, current Fiddler on the Roof star Adam Dannheisser, Daniel Jenkins, Dariush Kashani, Daniel Oreskes, Henry Russell, Joseph Siravo and T. Ryder Smith.
Mays earned a Tony nomination for his most recent Broadway stint in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder; he previously won for I Am My Own Wife and appeared in The Best Man, Pygmalion and Journey’s End.
Ehle won a Tony Award in 2007 for The Coast of Utopia and in 2000 for The Real Thing, for which she also received an Olivier nominations. Her additional credits include Design for Living on Broadway and The Philadelphia Story and Tartuffe in the West End.
Aronov returns to LCT after appearing in Golden Boy on Broadway and Blood and Gifts. In addition to Fiddler, Dannheisser’s Main Stem credits include Rock of Ages, Cymbeline and The Coast of Utopia. Jenkin’s Broadway credits include Golden Boy with LCT, Billy Elliot and Mary Poppins. Kashani has appeared off-Broadway previously in The Invisible Hand, The Happiest Song Plays Last and Homebody/Kabul. Oreskes’ previous credits include LCT’s Cymbeline, Electra and Aida. Russell last appeared on the Great White Way in The Audience; her additional credits include Machinal, The Winslow Boy and The Other Place. Siravo has previously appeared in The Light in the Piazza, Conversations with My Father and The Boys from Syracuse on Broadway. Smith made his Main Stem debut in Equus and went on to appear in War Horse.
The play tells the true—albeit little known—story of Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul and her husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, who together coordinated top-secret peace negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat in the early 1990s. Their efforts culminated in the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The show, billed as a darkly comic epic, brings dozens of diplomats and political figures together through various settings around the world.