Playbill.com, NY
Nov. 3, 2004
Award-Winning Drama Beast on the Moon Aiming for Broadway with Zorich
and Metwally
By Kenneth Jones
Producers of the developing New York production of Richard Kalinoski’s
Beast on the Moon are now aiming the work – a sensation in resident
theatres around the world – at Broadway in 2005 rather than the
previously-announced Off-Broadway.
The American play, about Armenian immigrants still dealing with the
shadows of the 1915 Armenian genocide – even as they face hope and
opportunity in their new home in Milwaukee – “is an absolutely
universal tale of love as a healing tool in the aftermath of wartime
loss,” according to producer David Grillo of Stillwater Productions.
The producer and partners are working toward a Broadway production in
2005, with Tony Award nominee Louis Zorich (Hadrian VII, Agamemnon, 45
Seconds From Broadway, Follies, She Loves Me) and Tony Award nominee
Omar Metwally (Sixteen Wounded) attached. Larry Moss (The Syringa Tree)
directs.
Three workshop presentations will be heard Nov. 11-12 in Manhattan. The
play – honored by the American Theatre Critics Association in 1996 –
has been performed in 16 nations, translated into 11 languages, and won
more than 40 awards around the world.
The work is billed as “a love story, and an American immigrant story,
whose two central characters are survivors of the Armenian Genocide of
1915.”
Members of the theatre industry can get more information about Beast on
the Moon by calling Stillwater Productions at (212) 541-4502.
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Kalinoski’s play debuted in 1995 at the Humana Festival of New American
Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. The intimate four-actor show
later blossomed in American regional theatres, from Los Angeles to
Boston, and then around the world.
The play received the 1996 Osborn Award from the American Theatre
Critics Association, recognizing an emerging playwright.
Playwright Kalinoski is a college professor at the University of
Wisconsin, Osh Kosh, where he teaches in the Theatre Arts department.
David Grillo, an actor who appeared in a 1999 Boston production of the
play, is to be lead producer for the commercial Off-Broadway stand.
The title, Beast on the Moon, refers to an ominous lunar eclipse.
“So much appeals to me about Beast that it is hard to find a place to
begin,” producer Grillo previously told Playbill On-Line. “It is an
extraordinarily challenging drama with a surprising number of
well-earned laughs. The play takes its audiences through an emotional
cataclysm and delivers them, at its finish, to joyful redemption. I
don’t like plays that ask me to jump through emotional hoops and then
leave me beaten up by the side of the road. Beast is redemptive. The
journey is hard, but one for which the audience is enormously grateful.
Also very important for me right now is that Beast on the Moon is a
play about Muslim/Christian relations that stresses healing.”
Beast on the Moon is a four-actor romance about two survivors – Aram
and Seta, a young man and his mail order bride – who settle in
Milwaukee between the World Wars (spanning 12 years) and seek to start
a family in the wake of the genocide of their past. They end up taking
an orphan under their wing. A aged narrator provides context.
Producer Grillo has two degrees from the University of California at
Berkeley, in Economics and Dramatic Arts, plus a masters in fine arts
in acting from the Yale School of Drama.
In 2003, Grillo acquired the rights to produce the play in New York,
after 10 months of negotiations. This is the first time the playwright
has granted the New York rights.