Seth Duerr to Direct and Star in Randy Cohen’s Punishing Blow

Seth Duerr will direct and star in four-time Emmy Award winner Randy Cohen’s The Punishing Blow: An Illustrated Lecture Delivered by Order of the Orange County Criminal Court, to be presented by the York Shakespeare Company at the Kirk Theatre, August 13-28.

Duerr will portray Leslie, an anti-Semitic college professor whose court-ordered public lecture is this play.

Cohen and Duerr will also appear together for Q&A sessions following every Saturday and Sunday matinee. In addition, they will join guest speakers at the following performances: journalist David Margolick (Wednesday, August 18); author Binnie Klein (Wednesday, August 25); ESPN columnist Paul Lukas (Thursday, August 26), and author and journalist David Rakoff (August 27).

Duerr previously appeared in the play’s world premiere at the Woodstock Fringe Festival in 2008, followed by a by a New York presentation of the work in January of 2009. He is the founder/artistic director of the York Shakespeare Company, and has directed and starred in numerous plays by Shakespeare and other authors. Cohen is the winner of four Emmy awards for his work as a writer for Late Night with David Letterman, TV Nation, and The Rosie O’Donnell Show and writes “The Ethicist”, a weekly column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

For more information, visit www.yorkshakespeare.org.