“There’s something intriguingly old-fashioned about her — she knows about form and language. She’s wonderful with suspense. I find myself sitting in her plays and getting scared, and I don’t know why.”
With two more high-profile plays opening in New York this season — and a huge movie deal in the works — Theresa Rebeck’s time may have come.
Theresa Rebeck’s new play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” just opened in New York — her fourth play to be staged on Broadway and her 30th in total. When asked the secret to her prolific writing career, Rebeck explains: “A lot of writers have this neurosis around finishing things, ‘the terror of finishing.’ I have the opposite thing: the terror of the unfinished. And so once I get to a certain place in a script my anxiety goes really high until I write the end.”
The scene is a restaurant kitchen in a fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. And it is true to form in all its detail, from the sleek, stainless-steel appliances to the oversize prep area suitable for a chef with an oversize ego to match.
But no diners will be coming to this restaurant because it is exists only on stage—specifically, the production of playwright Theresa Rebeck’s comedy “Seared,” which opened this week at Massachusetts’ Williamstown Theatre Festival. The show, which stars Hoon Lee, a Broadway veteran who also...
Acclaimed playwright Theresa Rebeck joins us to discuss her fourth play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” which opened September 25 at the American Airlines Theater, starring Janet McTeer in both title roles.
If you want to find Theresa Rebeck, she is in Brooklyn, writing. That explains her prodigious output: She has written or co-written more than 20 plays (“Omnium Gatherum,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; “Mauritius”; “The Understudy”), scripted cop shows on television, turned out a couple of novels and created the NBC show “Smash,” set in the world of Broadway.
Read Full Feature in The New York Times
Universal has picked up U.S. rights to “355,” a buzzy spy thriller with Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, and Fan Bingbing, out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival market, Variety has confirmed. The deal cost more than $20 million. The producers will now sell other markets in order to finance the roughly $75 million budget.
EXCLUSIVE: YouTube has given a pilot order to It’s a Man’s World (working title), a provocative half-hour comedy taking on gender inequality in the gaming industry. It is written by Smash creator Theresa Rebeck and produced by Christina Wayne’s Assembly Entertainment in association with ITV Studios America.
Hard to imagine there will be a hotter film package unveiled at Cannes next week than 355, a large-scale espionage film that Simon Kinberg will direct with an all-star international spy cast of Jessica Chastain, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing and Lupita Nyong’o. They’ll play international agents in a grounded, edgy action thriller that aims to alter a male-dominated genre with a true female ensemble, in the style of spy franchises The Bourne Identity, Mission: Impossible and James Bond. The script is by Theresa Rebeck. The hope is to launch a franchise.
Additional casting has been announced for the new musical Lempicka, and Theresa Rebeck’s latest comedy Seared.
Roundabout Theatre Company will present two world premieres as part of its 2018–2019 lineup: a Broadway production of Bernhardt/Hamlet by Pulitzer finalist Theresa Rebeck, directed by Tony nominee Moritz von Stuelpnagel, starring Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe, Tony, and Olivier Award winner Janet McTeer; and an Off-Broadway production of Toni Stone by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Tony winner Pam MacKinnon, with Emmy Award winner Uzo Aduba.
Tony winner McTeer, last on Broadway in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” in 2016, will lead the cast of “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” a new play written by Theresa Rebeck and directed Moritz von Stuelpnagel (“Hand to God,” “Present Laughter”). The world premiere comedy, a Roundabout commission, follows the actress Sarah Bernhardt as she sets out to play “Hamlet” in the famous 1899 production.
Is it chance or synchronicity that brings “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” a muscular comedy about a woman unbound, to Broadway at this grim transitional moment in gender politics?
Either way, Theresa Rebeck’s new play, which opened on Tuesday at the American Airlines Theater, is so clever it uplifts, so timely it hurts.
What a pleasure it is to watch a pair of acting pros like Angelica Huston and Bill Pullman, both in tip-top form, duke it out as embattled siblings in the pithily titled “Trouble.” It’s a film that begins as a raucous rural comedy and deftly evolves into a poignant and reflective, yet still wryly amusing, story of what becomes of a family.
