Jessie and Lina may be from vastly different financial backgrounds—Jessie is Ivy-educated and of the manor born; Lina has a night-school nursing degree and terrible credit—but they have one huge thing in common: they’ve been cracked open by the love they feel for their newborns. The two strike up a friendship and one coffee quickly becomes a daily coffee, as Jessie and Lina laugh through the highs and lows of motherhood. But their intimacy is punctured when a stranger who lives in the mansion up on the cliff appears in the yard, asking if they would include his wife, a new mom who is having “a hard time,” in their coffee klatch. Reluctantly, the duo tries to become a trio, but with very mixed—and surprising—results. After all, this is a town where the haves and the have-nots live in very close company; up on the cliff is Sands Point, one of the most expensive
Great Gatsby-esque neighborhoods in the whole country. How could that woman possibly be having a “hard time”? A comedy with dark edges,
Cry It Out takes an honest look at the absurdities of being home with a baby, the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work, and the effect class has on parenthood in America.
Runtime: 90 minutes. Join us for a panel discussion following the reading.
Playwright: Molly Smith Metzler
Director: Vivienne Benesch
Jessie: Molly Ward
Adrienne: Rachel Spencer Hewitt
Lina: Katie Paxton
Mitchell: Daniel Wilson
BIOS
MOLLY SMITH METZLER (playwright) is the author of
Cry it Out, Elemeno Pea, The May Queen, Carve, Close Up Space and
Training Wisteria. Her regional credits include: Northlight Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, South Coast Repertory, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Chautauqua Theater Company, City Theatre, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Geva Theatre Center, Mixed Blood Theatre Company and more. In New York City: Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC). Metzler’s awards include the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, the Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting and a finalist nod for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is a proud alumna of the Ars Nova Play Group, the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages and the Cherry Lane Mentor Project. In television, Metzler has written for
Casual (Hulu),
Orange Is the New Black (Netflix),
Codes of Conduct (HBO), and is currently a writer/producer on
Shameless (Showtime). She is also a screenwriter, currently adapting Ali Benjamin’s award-winning novel
The Thing About Jellyfish into a film for OddLot Entertainment with Made Up Stories and Pacific Standard (Reese Witherspoon’s company). Metzler was educated at the State University of New York at Geneseo, Boston University, New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts and the Juilliard School. She lives in Los Angeles and Kingston, N.Y.
KATIE PAXTON is an actress, teacher and mama based in Raleigh. Film/Television:
The Long Road Home,
Billy & Billie,
The Good Wife,
Forever, The Blacklist,
How He Fell in Love and
The Heart Machine. Recent theatre:
The Way of the World by Theresa Rebeck (Dorset Theatre Festival World Premiere) and
Bedroom Farce(Huntington Theatre Company). PlayMakers Repertory Company:
In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Noises Off!, The Imaginary Invalid, Cabaret, Henry IV&V, As You Like It, Big River. Katie holds a BA and MFA in acting from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
MOLLY WARD: Off-Broadway: Kin, The Big Meal (Playwrights Horizons, Sam Gold dir);
Jesus In India (Ma-Yi Theater Co);
Sisters In Blizzard (Ensemble Studio Theater);
The Tenant (Woodshed Collective);
The Shape of Metal (Origin Theater Co.);
The Nosemaker’s Apprentice (The Brick Theater).
Regional: Othello, World Premiere of
Make Believe (Hartford Stage);
Three Sisters, Romeo & Juliet, Seagull (American Repertory Theater
); Find & Sign (World Premiere, Pioneer Theater);
Our House (World Premiere, Denver Center);
Imaginary Invalid (Playmakers Repertory Theater);
Camille (Bard Summerscape);
Lost Girls (Theater Exile).
Film: The Art of Wooing. Television:The Path, Are We There Yet Education/Training: MFA Harvard/Moscow Art bedTheater School.
DANIEL P. WILSON: Dan is an actor/director/producer, as well as a proud husband and occasional stay at home dad to three amazing kids. A recent transplant from the SF Bay Area, he's performed onstage and on-camera in Chicago, Sweden, and across California. He trained at PCPA and holds a BFA from Roosevelt University. Locally he has been seen onstage as Czolgosz in Assassins at Theatre in the Park, as Thad Stem in Blood Done Sign My Name at Raleigh Little Theatre, as Pale in Burn This at Sonorous Road, as Mark in The Herd at Honest Pint, as The Doge and Chamberlain in Life of Galileo at Playmakers, and as Boris Pronsky in Junk with Theatre Raleigh. Special thanks to Anna and the kids for endless love and support! Visit
www.danielpaulwilson.com for more info.
RACHEL SPENCER HEWITT is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama MFA Acting program. Her work includes Broadway (
King Charles III), Off-Broadway (
The Seagull, A Civil War Christmas, Peter and the Startcatcher), numerous regional theatres around the country, and the Chautauqua Theatre Company Conservatory as a graduate student with Vivenne Benesch. She's the founder of Parent Artist Advocacy League for the Performing Arts (PAAL), which has been mentioned in multiple publications, including
The New York Times,
American Theatre Magazine,
HowlRound Theatre Commons, and
WAMU for NPR News in Washington D.C
. She has participated in national think tanks, on panels, and facilitated workshops on parenting in the arts at multiple gatherings, including the national TCG conferences, Disney Theatrical's Women of Broadway panel on Parenthood, BroadwayCon, and StateraArts’ annual conference on gender equity in the arts.
VIVIENNE BENESCH: Producing Artistic Director for PlayMakers Repertory Company since January 2016, where she has directed acclaimed productions of Brecht’s
Life of Galileo, Mike Wiley and Laurelyn Dossett’s
Leaving Eden (world premiere), Molly Smith Metzler’s
The May Queen, Daniel Beaty’s
Mr. Joy, Deborah Salem Smith’s
Love Alone, John Logan’s
RED, Sarah Ruhl’s
In The Next Room and Libby Appel’s adaptation of
Three Sisters. From 2005 to 2016 she was the Artistic Director of the renowned Chautauqua Theater Company and Conservatory. She has directed many classics and developed new work with dozens of writers including Noah Haidle, Kate Fodor, Molly Smith Metzler, Mike Wiley, Anna Ziegler and Zayd Dohrn. As an educator, Vivienne has served on the faculty of some of the nation’s foremost actor-training programs including Juilliard, Trinity Rep/Brown, UNC/PlayMakers and her graduate school alma mater, NYU. Vivienne is the 2017 recipient of the
