NEW YORK (AP) - Before David Hyde Pierce gets caught up with a meddling matchmaker on Broadway, he'll be consulting the stars in Adam Bock's play "A Life" off-Broadway.
Playwrights Horizons said Thursday that the Tony Award-winning actor will star this fall in the world premiere of a play in its intimate, 128-seat theater about a hopelessly single man who turns to astrology for answers.
Pierce did a reading of the play and it went well. "He's perfect," said Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons. "He felt that and we all felt that. It's a play that matters."
Rising star playwright Bock also wrote "A Small Fire," ''The Receptionist" and "Swimming in the Shallows." The play will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who has helmed "Smokefall" and "Detroit."
"It feels very vernacular when you read it and yet he has a really poetic heart," said Sanford of Bock's play. "He has a very adept way of unsuspectingly ripping the mask off the world he's portraying and showing the base essence of things."
"The Life" will be at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater beginning September 2016.The rest of their season includes the family drama "Aubergine" by Julia Cho, the epic "Rancho Viejo" by Dan LeFranc, the time-shifting "The Light Years" by the actor-writer team Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, a Muslim-American exploration in "The Profane" by Zayd Dohrn, and the fresh new musical "Bella: An American Tall Tale" by Kirsten Childs.
"Our goal overall is a diversity of voices, of styles and experience and any style of diversity you might have," said Sanford. "It's just like a smorgasbord of talent and inspiration that American theater has to offer."
Former "Frasier" star Pierce will go from "A Life" to starring opposite Bette Midler in the spring Broadway revival of "Hello, Dolly!" Pierce was last on Broadway directing the romantic comedy musical "It Shoulda Been You."
Pierce made his Playwrights Horizons debut in 1987 in Richard Greenberg's "The Maderati" and also appeared in their 1989 Broadway production of The Heidi Chronicles.
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