Stars Will Shine at Guild Hall
Bruce Willis, Brooke Adams, Michael Nouri, Mercedes Ruehl, and Harris Yulin are among the stars who will be out this week at Guild Hall, where a jazz-infused benefit for the Pushcart Prize and WordTheatre in the Schools and two staged readings will be presented.
“Hey, Doyle! — Tales and Jazz” will bring to life the writings of Brian Doyle, a four-time awardee of the Pushcart Prize and the editor of Portland magazine, who died in 2017 at the age of 60.
Mr. Willis will perform “Memorial Day,” a short essay by Mr. Doyle published posthumously in the most recent volume of the annual Pushcart Prize anthology of the best of the small presses published and edited by Bill Henderson, who lives in Springs.
Other actors who will bring Mr. Doyle’s stories to life are Paul Guilfoyle, Sharon Lawrence, Lorraine Toussaint, Bruce Vilanch, Bellamy Young, and Ms. Adams and Mr. Nouri. The program, which will take place on Saturday at 8:30 p.m., is produced and directed by Cedering Fox, the artistic director of WordTheatre, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the tradition of storytelling.
Tickets are $40 to $65, $38 to $63 for members. V.I.P. tickets, which include an after-party from 10 to midnight, are $250.
On Monday at 8 p.m., Ms. Ruehl and Mr. Yulin will star as two longtime lovers, Emma and Jerry, in a staged reading of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play “Betrayal,” which Mr. Yulin will also direct. The play marked a departure for the Nobel Prize-winning playwright from the spare, elliptical works that established his reputation.
“Betrayal” begins in 1977, when Emma and Jerry meet after her marriage to Robert dissolves, and then works backward to the beginning of their affair nine years earlier, exposing in the process secrets about the characters and calling into question the nature of their intimacy.
Writing for The Telegraph about a 2011 London production, Charles Spencer said, “It concerns itself . . . with the devious workings of the human heart, with love and guilt and passion. And it does so with emotional depth, subtlety, and an immense technical panache.” Tickets are $30 to $75, $28 to $70 for members.
A staged reading of “Daughters of the Sexual Revolution,” a play by Dana Leslie Goldstein directed and developed by Kimberly Loren Eaton, will be onstage next Thursday at 8 p.m.
Set in suburban New York in 1976, it focuses on the fallout from an affair between two married women, Joyce and Nina, which is discovered when a surprise visit from Joyce’s daughter catches the women in an intimate moment.
Ms. Goldstein is an award-winning playwright whose work has been shown at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Cherry Lane Theatre, Theatre 80 St. Marks, New Dramatists, and many others. Tickets are $30 to $75, $28 to $70 for members.