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April 5, 2007
Cap & Bells presents World Premiere of "8-Hour Father"
Award winning director Andrew Lazarow continues his collaboration with critically lauded playwright Andrew Dainoff on the new explosive drama, 8-Hour Father. Andrew Dainoff’s previous plays include All We Can Handle and Amuse Bouche: To Please the Mouth. Lazarow is a senior at Williams College, a core company member of Cincinnati’s New Stage Collective, and will be the founding artistic director of a new theatre company in Seattle, WA later this year. 8-Hour Father will premiere at Williams College where it will be produced by Cap and Bells.
Dainoff and Lazarow began working on 8-Hour Father a little over a year ago. The first draft was read off-Broadway last spring at Playwrights Horizons. Dainoff spent the following months reworking the play, which began rehearsals at Williams this March.
Williams College is a fitting location for the play’s premiere. 8-Hour Father is set in a provincial college town. As two couples attempt to exorcise their pasts, they find that their realities are intertwined by family, guilt, obligation, sex and college football. The 8-Hour Father takes an acerbic look at whom we fall for and why. Can you love somebody regardless of their past?
Dainoff and Lazarow started collaborating in 2005 on Dainoff’s first play, All We Can Handle, which is published in the Back Stage Book of New American Short Plays 2005. They spent a little over a year working on rewrites and a workshop. In that time All We Can Handle received a reading at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. The play premiered at the 2006 Cincinnati Fringe Festival. The production was nominated for two Cincinnati Entertainment Awards. The play, and the Cincinnati production drew praise from critics and artists:
Absolutely Shattering! Speaks to our condition like no other play.
—2-time TONY nominee Craig Lucas
I loved the play, there was nothing in it that didn’t seem alive and worth being there.
—4-time Obie Award Winner Wallace Shawn
I'm predicting that "All We Can Handle" is going to stand as the sensation of this year's Cincinnati Fringe Festival. … Lazarow … has great assurance as a director. He isn't afraid to take his time. He doesn't rush. He has an instinctive sense of drama that uses performer and design to help connect the audience and the work … Dainoff sets David off on a journey that takes him from Los Angeles to New York, to love, to friendship, to Staten Island, to Rome and a deep questioning of his being.
—Jackie Demaline, Cincinnati Enquirer.
Using 9/11 as a springboard, this intimate yet epic monologue explores coming of age and coming apart in the midst of tragedy. New Stage Collective's production was a standout at this year's Cincinnati Fringe Festival, and the script is possibly the best American play thus far on the subject.
—Alan Scheidt, CityBeat
8-Hour Father will be performed May 3 - 5 at 8:30 pm in the Adams Memorial Theatre of the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance. Tickets are $3 each. To make a reservation, please contact the Box Office at (413) 597 2425. The box office is open Tuesday through Friday, 1pm-4pm, and 1 hour before each performance. The Box Office accepts cash and check only. For more information, please visit http://www.williams.edu/go/62center
