Jo Bonney to Helm Neil LaBute's Fat Pig at MCC

Neil LaBute will not be directing the MCC Theater premiere of his new play Fat Pig as previously announced. LaBute withdrew from the project because of scheduling conflicts. Jo Bonney is now set to helm the mounting.

A fixture off-Broadway, Bonney's New York directing credits include Living Out, Fifth of July, Adoration of the Old Woman, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Humpty Dumpty, Suburbia, Stop Kiss, Good Thing, Slanguage, Look Back in Anger, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, Some People, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, The Fastest Clock in the Universe, The Flatted Fifth, At Midnight and Morning Rain and Stray Cats. Bonney is the recipient of a 1998 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Direction. In February she will helm Christopher Shinn's On The Mountain for Playwrights Horizons.

Fat Pig centers on a man who is dating an overweight woman. His friends make fun of her, but will he listen? The play traces the courtship of two people who truly care for one another set against a world that ridicules and ostracizes those who do not fit into a Hollywood realm of ideal beauty and scathingly questions the superficial values of the world of today.

The dark piece is scheduled to run at the Lucille Lortel from November 17 to January 8, 2005.