Our season opens with the gripping mystery-thriller Night Watch, by Lucille Fletcher. As the curtain rises we see Elaine Wheeler pacing about in her luxurious Manhattan apartment near dawn, unable to sleep. While her husband is trying to calm her, she spots something through her window, inside an apartment in a building across the way, disturbing, distant, yet clearly visible to her – a raggedy chair, half in shadow...  As seeming illusion melds with existing reality and her haunting memories, Elaine is confronted by family, friends, and the authorities, and slowly drawn into a fearsome web of intrigue and foreboding. As the plot ever thickens, the atmosphere of menace and suspense builds to a chilling climax.

(Note:  Unlike our other shows this season, there will be NO performance on the third Sunday, 10/4)

★ Swift-moving • Riveting • Chilling★

THE CAST
ELAINE WHEELER	Pierlisa Chiodo-Steo
JOHN WHEELER	Walter DeShields
MATILDA	Cherri Poet
VANELLI	Ed Mancinkiewicz
CURTIS APPLEBY	Richard Geller
BLANCHE COOKE	Bonnie Grant
LIEUTENANT WALKER	Bob O’Neal
DR. TRACEY LAKE	Sonya Aiko Hearn
SAM HOKE	Gary Labowitz
DIRECTOR	Tracie Lango

As our second offering this season we proudly bring to you Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, a joyous, sprawling, and rollicking farce, one of the most enduring and endearing classics of the American stage. The Matchmaker marks the 500^th production at The Stagecrafters.

Set in Yonkers and New York City near the end of the nineteenth century, the action takes place in the course of a single day . . . and what action it is! Love makes the world go ‘round, but a little money will grease the wheels – so proclaims canny marriage broker, Dolly Gallagher Levi. Engaged by rich, wife-seeking widower Horace Vandergelder, she artfully conspires to snag the man for herself and, in so doing, sets off a whirlwind of assorted missteps, mishaps, mistaken identities, and romantic entanglements that befall a dozen-or-so inter-related characters, each in their way primed to experience something new and invigorating in their lives.

★ Witty • Fun-filled • Charming ★

The first production of the new year at The Stagecrafters theater is the riveting mystery-thriller, "A Soldier’s Play" by Charles Fuller, which opens on Friday, February 5, 2010. The action deals with the investigation of the murder of a black sergeant at an army base in Louisiana in 1944 during World War II. As the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the killing proceeds, the psychological complexities of the case come to the forefront, and easy stereotypical judgments become questionable and are, one-by-one, refuted. The play, which is flawlessly structured as a classic whodunit, provides a mesmerizing narrative and delivers at the same time a scorching commentary on ingrained bigotry, racism, and social injustice. Critic Frank Rich (N.Y. Times) noted that Fuller’s writing “... speaks to both blacks and whites without patronizing either [and embraces] volatile contradictions ... to arrive at the shattering truth.”

Charles Fuller, born in Philadelphia in 1939, earned the D.F.A. degree at La Salle University in 1967 and co-founded the Afro-American Arts Theatre that same year in Philadelphia. In 1971 Fuller moved to New York City and, over the following decade with the Negro Ensemble Company, wrote and produced, among several plays, one of which, Zooman and the Sign (1980), won an Obie award. A Soldier’s Play, which opened at Manhattan’s Theatre Four in 1981, featured Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson. A huge critical and popular success, it won Fuller the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama and the New York Drama Critics Award. He also adapted his script to the 1984 film, A Soldier’s Story, which won him the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Film Screenplay. After some twenty-five years the play indeed retains its power to engage theatergoers and to hold them spellbound.

★ Gripping • Shocking • Unforgettable ★

★ Eerie • Surreal • Thought-provoking ★