Essential Self Defence by Adam Rapp added to Playwrights Horizons 2006-7 season

Playwrights Horizons and the 2006 Obie Award-winning Edge Theater will produce the World Premiere of Essential Self Defence, a new play by Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award winner Adam Rapp.

Essential Self Defence is Mr. Rapp�s follow-up to Red Light Winter - currently playing at the Barrow Street Theater. He is the Resident Playwright of Edge Theater.

Directed by Carolyn Cantor, it will begin performances in Spring 2007 at Playwrights Horizons� Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Casting and designers will be announced in the coming months.

In Essential Self Defence, a disgruntled misfit takes a job as an attack dummy in a women�s self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to the repressed bookworm who�s beating on him. But all�s not well on the mean Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend and a motley assortment of poets, butchers and punk librarians prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town.

Essential Self Defence will be the sixth and final production of Playwrights Horizons 2006-2007 season.

The play joins five previously-announced productions:

• The World Premiere of Crazy Mary
  Playwright: A.R. Gurney
  Director: Jim Simpson
  Cast: tba
  Synopsis: In an attempt to account for the family inheritance, the scion of a wealthy Buffalo, NY clan and her willful, college-aged son visit their long lost cousin Mary. The catch: Mary is living in an asylum, and has barely spoken in years, forcing mother and son to employ radical ends to get through.
  Venue: Playwright Horizons' Main Stage
  Dates: tba
  
• The New York Premiere of Frank's Home
  Playwright: Richard Nelson
  Director: Robert Falls
  Cast: tba
  Synopsis: It is summer, 1923, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright has recently left Chicago for California, determined to embrace Hollywood's youthful zest and mend broken relationships with his adult children. Having recently completed his latest 'wonder of the world' � Tokyo's Imperial Hotel � Wright is poised to settle down and embrace his new home. But his splintered family still holds deep-seated resentments.
  Produced in association with The Goodman Theatre, where it will premiere this Fall.
  Venue: Playwright Horizons' Main Stage
  Dates: tba
  
• The New York premiere of Floyd and Clea Under the Western Sky
  Book and Lyrics: David Cale
  Music: Jonathan Kreisberg and David Cale
  Director: Joe Calarco
  Cast: tba
  Synopsis: Burnt out, living out of his Studebaker, former country-western star Floyd Duffner�s best days seem to be behind him. But when a 20 year-old feral beauty with an electrifying voice enters the picture, an unlikely friendship and musical partnership begins to blossom.
  Venue: Playwright Horizons' Main Stage
  Dates: tba
  
• The New York Premiere of The Pain and the Itch
  Playwright: Bruce Norris
  Director: Anna D. Shapiro
  Cast: tba
  Synopsis: With a young daughter in serious need of attention and a ravenous creature possibly prowling the upstairs bedrooms, what begins as an average Thanksgiving for one privileged family unravels into an expos� of disastrous choices and less-than-altruistic motives.
  Venue: Playwright Horizons' Main Stage
  Dates: tba
  
• The New York premiere of Blue Door
  Playwright: Tanya Barfield
  Director: tba
  Cast: tba
  Synopsis: When a prominent African-American mathematician in crisis begins to lose his grip on reality, the ghosts of ancestors past shatter the silence of an insomnia-filled night.
  Venue: Playwright Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater
  Dates: tba