Gavin Lawrence, Peter Rachleff Set for Carlyle Brown’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been…

The Guthrie Theater has announced complete casting for the presentation of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been…, written and conceived by Carlyle Brown. This new and original piece will play May 4 – 20, 2012 in the Dowling Studio at the Guthrie Theater. Noël Raymond directs.

The year is 1953 in the Harlem apartment of African American writer Langston Hughes. Unable to sleep in light of the hearing he faces the next day, he gets up and begins to write a poem but finds his living space somehow inhabited by his readers. Exposed, guilt-ridden and fearful, he confesses how he intends to answer McCarthy’s accusations that he is a communist–imploring his readers not to abandon him no matter what they might read or hear.

The cast includes Gavin Lawrence (Langston Hughes), Steve Hendrickson (Senator Dirksen), John Middleton (Roy Cohn) and Peter Rachleff (Senator Joseph McCarthy), along with Brown, who appears in the play as Lawyer Frank Reeves.

The artistic team includes Joe Stanley (set designer), Clare Brauch (costume designer), Mike Wangen (lighting designer), and C. Andrew Mayer (sound designer).

For more information and tickets to Are You Now or Have You Ever Been… click here.