David Hare's
The Bay at Nice
April 14 - May 20, 2007
at
NewPlace Studio Theatre in the NoHo Arts District
David Hare's The Bay at Nice is set in a room in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in 1956, where an aging Valentina, once a young student (and possibly lover) of Henri Matisse, has been asked to help authenticate a painting for the museum staff. She is accompanied by her daughter Sophia, a teacher but also an artist, now unhappily married to a Party bureaucrat and desperate to be free of her marriage and start a new life, for which she needs her mother's approval and financial assistance. The result is a battle of wills between the two women, one an ex-Bohemian, who left the freedom of Paris to raise her fatherless child in a repressive Russia, and the daughter, now grown into a stifled woman in her thirties eager to taste the freedom her mother once enjoyed.
Sir David Hare is one of Great Britain's most honored and most prolific playwrights (Plenty, The Secret Rapture, Pravda); his most recent high profile plays were the Broadway production of The Vertical Hour with Bill Nighy and Julianne Moore and the Los Angeles production of Stuff Happens, which featured Andak Artistic Director Dakin Matthews in a memorable turn as Vice-President Dick Cheney.
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