It's 3:00 a.m., 1928 in a New York City flea bag hotel. A stark summer night and time is frozen as a small-time hustler, Erie, sees magic in the mundane and gushes out tall tales in dreamy vivacious soliloquies while his only companion Charlie, the night-clerk, ruminates silently about being anyone, just anyone, but himself.

"Two worlds – fantasy and reality – are the ones that O’Neill grappled with throughout his playwriting career. But nowhere else does he present the two side-by-side and with such elegant simplicity.

It is in Hughie where O’Neill most fully suggests an alternative to his tragic view of life, looking beyond tragedy, beyond mourning, to something that could be called hope.

Hughie possesses the perfect formal symmetry, the extraordinary artistic invention and the concentrated atmospheric effect of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. In drama, the play looks back to Strindberg’s “chamber plays” and forward to the taut, evocative, poetic pieces of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter."
- Drew Lichtenberg, Dramaturg, Shakespeare Theatre Company

Sept 2 to 18; Fri/Sat @ 7:30; Sun @ 2:00. Tickets $15 to $25.

Direction by Jerry Mouawad. Starring Todd Van Voris with Sean Doran. Light Design by Jeff Forbes. Costume Design by Sumi Wu.