MCC Theater (Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey, Artistic Directors; William Cantler, Associate Artistic Director; Blake West, Executive Director) announced that Logan Marshall-Green and Piper Perabo (current star of MCC’s production of reasons to be pretty) will join the cast of tonight’s special reading of Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher Street).

These two readings of plays by Neil LaBute exploring America’s obsession with physical beauty highlights the current LaBute play Off-Broadway. MCC’s current production of LaBute’s bristling new comic drama reasons to be pretty puts a final, ferocious cap on a trilogy of plays that began with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig (which MCC also premiered). The series brings together many of the original artists from the first two plays in the trilogy in support of the critically-acclaimed reasons to be pretty, which marks the sixth collaboration between MCC Theater and LaBute, MCC’s Playwright-in-Residence.

Mr. Marshall-Green and Ms. Perabo complete a cast that includes Anna Camp (The Country Girl, The Scene) and Austin Lysy (Hitch, A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Acclaimed director Carolyn Cantor, who last worked with Neil LaBute on MCC Theater’s 2007 production of In a Dark Dark House, will direct. Logan Marshall-Green replaces Paul Rudd who, due to a last-minute schedule change, will not be available to perform in the reading.

This special one-night-only reading of The Shape of Things is performed tonight, Monday, June 23 at 7:00 p.m. at the Lortel, where reasons to be pretty is currently playing to sold-out audiences. As previously announced, reasons to be pretty will transfer to Broadway later this season.

A limited number of tickets for The Shape of Things are still available and can be purchased at the Lucille Lortel box office, by visiting www.mcctheater.org or through www.ticketcentral.com or by calling (212) 279-4200.

Source: TheFutonCritic.com

Meanwhile, NBC is still keeping its midseason options open as promotional materials for four of its pilots that didn’t make its 2008-09 schedule have been released:

BLUE BLOOD - “THERE’S A NEW ROOKIE IN TOWN. From the Hamptons to the South Bronx, Blue Blood follows the true story of Harvard educated cop Ed Conlon in his first year as an NYPD officer. He joins a group of rookies, fresh out of the academy, assigned to beat patrol. Despite what the academy taught them, they will learn that being a rookie is as much about upholding the law as it is about survival on the streets. Blue Blood is an action drama that takes us into the hearts and minds of those sworn to protect and serve.” Cast: Logan Marshall-Green as Ed, Kate Levering as Colt, Vincent Piazza as Bobby, April Lee Hernandez as Sophia, Larenz Tate as Andre, Alex Fernandez as Sgt. Vargas. Studios: 20th Century Fox Television, Little Engine.

Logan is mentioned as being the inspiration for a short film at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Source: NY daily News

In the short “All Saints Day,” a quietly sad young woman (Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep) is heading home in a bedraggled costume the morning after Halloween - and an unsatisfying one-night stand.

Looking for directions, she strikes up a conversation with a charming young man (Benjamin Walker) sipping a cup of coffee on his Manhattan stoop.

Writer Brooke Berman came up with the idea for the plot the old-fashioned way: She and director Will Frears (son of Stephen Frears) stole it from life.

“Will heard this great story from our friend, [actor] Logan Marshall-Green,” says Berman, who is developing an expanded version of the short.

“Logan’s birthday is Nov. 1, and every year on his birthday his favorite thing to do is get up early, make a cup of coffee and go sit on the steps and watch the walk of shame in costume.”

With that seed of an idea, Berman, who was living in L.A. at the time, wrote the first draft in a day - after a little digging for details.

Source: Variety

Until it self-destructs — crushed by the weight of its own self-regard — “U.S. Drag” seems well worthy of the Blackburn Prize conferred on scribe Gina Gionfriddo for her satirical look at a generation raised to expect the material world to fall into its lap, but hungry for more substantial values. Young, fit and hot to go, the self-assured thesps in helmer Trip Cullman’s production for StageFarm have the stuff to make a smart showing of the young career climbers whose lives are transformed by a serial killer named Ed. But when the satire turns into self-worship, even Ed wears out his welcome.

Gionfriddo is at her wittiest in the opening scenes that introduce us to best friends Allison (Tanya Fischer) and Angela (Lisa Joyce), ambitious young things positively affronted at having to start their careers in low-paying jobs. “I don’t want to be entry level,” Allison protests, pointing out that the work is demeaning to someone of her intelligence and education — and the pay is pathetic. “It’s hard to work for a little when what you want is a lot. I want a lot.”

Although she only holds a Magna to Allison’s Summa, Angela is even huffier about their sense of entitlement — and their humiliating need for money. Both thesps are adorably hateful as these pouty princesses storm the stage in their chic little club dresses, fuming about the unfairness of a pay-for-play society that refuses to acknowledge their existential superiority.

Helmer Cullman is just as clever at establishing a visceral sense of the hermetic world where the girls and their friends circulate. There are some flaws in the design: Aside from the aesthetic lift, little use is made of the catwalk level of Sandra Goldmark’s two-tiered set of heavy metal scaffolding and chain link fencing — so tough it could pass for a prison until the neon club lights flash on and the indoor furnishings fly in. And while the jangling rhythms of Bart Fasbender’s sound design reflect the frenetic situations in which Allison and Angela become involved, the surroundsound approach overwhelms any more subtle emotional interactions onstage.

But these are correctable problems, and the show looks good; so do the thesps playing the various losers and weepers who figure in the girls’ unstable lives.

Again, Gionfriddo is best at introductions, and first impressions are strong. James Martinez makes mincemeat of a trust fund kid who enlists Allison and Angela in his bleeding-heart campaigns to rescue death-row inmates, downtrodden prostitutes and other dubious victims of society. “I know the pain one feels in impotence,” he says, telling the girls, who are hitting him up for money, all they need to know about him.

Matthew Stadelmann finds inspiration in the animal kingdom, bringing the unloveliest aspects of a wasp and a snake to his keen study of Ned, a petulant Wall Streeter who lets the girls crash in his apartment, so long as they bring friends home to party.

Logan Marshall-Green cunningly hides his natural charisma to take on Christopher, a lionized author whose work of “creative nonfiction” is no more than the childish whine of someone who feels insufficiently adored by his parents. A simple question about the “truth” of his book triggers a lecture on postmodernism that brings out the best of Gionfriddo’s cutting satiric style.

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