For Immediate Release

Onstage at Theatre Three: Defiance

Theatre Three’s 2008-2009 Season continues with the gripping new drama, Defiance by John Patrick Shanley. Theatre Three’s forty-eighth season is a world tour of theater. Beginning with the comic mayhem of a garden festival at an English manor house, the season concludes with the harrowing drama of a South African courtroom. The shows between include a homegrown military drama, a romantic musical set in Florence, a witty Spanish Golden Age comedy, a modern French flirtatious farce, and a classic mystery set on the Nile River. Defiance begins previews on Thursday, September 4, 2008 and will close on Sunday, October 5, 2008. “You know, I’m still looking for a good clean fight.” “Listen, you dumb son of a bitch: There’s no such thing!”– Defiance. The second play in a planned trilogy of plays, Defiance is John Patrick Shanley’s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Doubt. Defiance looks at a moment in American history when the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement were shaking social structures, and explores the challenges to authority and accepted morality that emerge at one Marine Corps base as a result. Set in 1971, Lt. Colonel Littlefield is trying to navigate racial tensions as well as morale issues at Camp Lejeune. In an effort appease some of the racial anxieties; he promotes an unwilling African American officer, Captain Lee King, to be his Executive Officer. But when King learns of Littlefield’s own bad behavior, both men have to decide what the next “right” course of action is. About The Playwright: John Patrick Shanley John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, Italian American Reconciliation, Four Dogs and a Bone, Beggars in the House of Plenty, Psychopathia Sexualis, Cellini, Where's My Money?, Dirty Story, Doubt and Defiance. In the arena of screenwriting, he has eight movies to his credit, most recently Live From Baghdad for HBO, for which he received an Emmy nomination. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive and Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also directed. For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

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