OPEN ADMISSIONS
Full Length Play, Short Play, Television Special (CBS)
OVERVIEW OF THE PLAY:
The play centers on a disenchanted urban college speech professor and her brilliant but illiterate black student who dreams of a racially equal education to help him achieve that dream.
4m; 7w.
AWARDS:
A Tony nominated drama, OPEN ADMISSIONS received two Drama Desk nominations, and both a Theatre World Award and a Samuel French Playwriting Award. The play, was a New York Times pick for the “Ten Best Plays of the Year” list, and also garnered the prestigious Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award.
PLAY HISTORY:
Broadway, The Music Box Theatre. Vincent D'Onofrio's Broadway debut.
The Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, CT
Directed by Arven Brown.
New York's Ensemble Studio Theatre
Center Stage, Baltimore, MD
Metropolitan State University, Minneapolis, MN
Bates College, ME
Adapted as a CBS Television Special, starring Jane Alexander and Michael Beach, with Dennis Farina and Estelle Parsons.
REVIEWS:
OPEN ADMISSIONS
(Full and short length versions)
"Packs a punch!...explosive confrontation...OPEN ADMISSIONS has had a profound effect on its audiences, leaving some viewers in tears, others stone silent...a devastating play...a no-win confrontation that shows us the full dimensions of a contemporary tragedy."
-The New York Times
"A small masterpiece"
-New York Magazine
"OPEN ADMISSIONS," at the Music Box, merits more than just an A for relevance. Shirley Lauro has written a thoughtful, sometimes comic, and ultimately moving drama about an inner-city black youth's collision with a well-meaning educational policy that can have dire consequences."
-The Christian Science Monitor
"Shirley Lauro's OPEN ADMISSIONS is funny but infinitely more, it is poignant."
-The New York Post
AVAILABLE FROM:
Samuel French, Inc.
http://www.samuelfrench.com
45 West 25th Street - Dept.W
New York, NY 10010
Phone (212) 206-8990
Fax (212) 206-1429 Samuel French, Inc.
7623 Sunset Blvd. - Dept.W
Hollywood, CA 90046
Phone (323) 876-0570
Fax (323) 876-6822
OF INTEREST:
This play is available in THE MERCURY READER, 2002 Edition
Pearson Custom Publishing Publisher: Longman
POLITICAL STAGES: PLAYS THAT SHAPED A CENTURY
Applause Books: NY, 2002
INTERCULTURAL JOURNEYS THROUGH READING AND WRITING by Marilyn Smith Layton,
Harper Collins: NY
LIVING IN THE USA
by Kathleen Shine Cain
Allyn and Bacon: MA