Groff, Tierney, O'Toole, Ivey & More Join Playwrights Horizons Season

Spring Awakening star Jonathan Groff, ER alum Maura Tierney and Smallville regular Annette O'Toole are among the artists who have signed on for Playwright Horizons' upcoming season. The company released further details for four previously announced productions and added two new plays, Evan Smith's The Savannah Disputation and Christina Anderson's Inked Baby, to the schedule.

Tierney TV's ER, Some Girls at MCC, Aya Cash From Up Here, The Pain and the Itch and Brian J. Smith Good Boys and True, Come Back Little Sheba have been cast in Nicky Silver's previously announced Three Changes, which will kick off the season at Playwrights Horizons' Mainstage Theater, beginning previews on August 22. Additional casting is still be announced for this comedy about a comfortably married, Upper West Side couple whose life takes an ominous turn when the husband's wayward brother arrives from Hollywood. Wilson Milam directs.

Groff will follow up his summer stint in the Public Theater's Central Park production of Hair with Craig Lucas' Prayer for My Enemy, a Mainstage production to be directed by Bartlett Sher. Cassie Beck, a 2008 Theater World Award winner for The Drunken City, and Skipp Sudduth Sher's current revival of South Pacific have also joined the cast. In the summer of 2004, Austin Noone Sudduth is watching his nature shows and trying to keep from falling off the wagon, son Billy Groff is just back from Iraq, and pregnant daughter Marianne Beck is upset about the state of her marriage to Tad, Billy's childhood friend who may still harbor a crush on him.

O'Toole The Seagull at CSC, A Mighty Wind, Smallville, Ray Anthony Thomas Forced Continuum and Katherine Waterston Los Angeles have joined the cast of Kindness, the first fall production at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, written and directed by Adam Rapp. O'Toole plays an ailing mother who flees Illinois and a crumbling marriage with her teenage son for the relative calm and safety of a midtown Manhattan hotel.

Tony winner Michael Mayer has agreed to direct the fourth previously announced production, Theresa Rebeck's Our House, which will be presented on the Mainstage Theater in spring 2009. The play is described as a cautionary tale ripped from the headlines about what happens when reality collides with reality TV.

Details on the two newly announced productions are as follows:

The Savannah Disputation by Evan Smith
Dana Ivey Driving Miss Daisy, Sunday in the Park with George, Butley will star in this Mainstage Theater production in winter/spring 2009, directed by Tony winner Walter Bobbie Chicago. When susceptible Catholic spinster Margaret politely admits door-to-door Pentecostal missionary Melissa into her home, her seemingly-solid faith starts to waver, much to the chagrin of her feisty sister Mary Ivey. But show's the blasphemer and who's the believer? Ivey previously appeared in Smith's The Uneasy Chair at Playwrights Horizons in 1998; additional casting is still to be announced.

Inked Baby by Christina Anderson
This world premiere will be produced at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in spring 2009, directed by Kate Whoriskey. Stuck for money and unable to conceive, Gloria enlists the aid of her sister to make the child that she and her husband can't. As they uneasily await the baby's arrival, a mysterious contamination spreads outside. The play is described as an imaginative, otherworldly drama; no casting has been announced.