Playwright Mickle Maher is once again using newsman Jim Lehrer as a character onstage. Twice again, actually. Maher’s new play, Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double, will premiere in a Theater Oobleck production on Inauguration Day, January 20, featuring both Colm O’Reilly and Brian Shaw as versions of Lehrer—one the retired PBS NewsHour anchor, the other a failed playwright, and both in imminent danger in what Oobleck describes as “a comic-gothic horror tale that relates the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Antonin Artaud to the politics and theater of our day.”
Both O’Reilly and Shaw played Lehrer—though not at the same time—in Oobleck’s 2007 production of Maher’s The Strangerer, which recast the 2004 presidential debate moderated by Lehrer between George W. Bush and John Kerry with an absurdist twist of Albert Camus. Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double will run at the Chopin Theatre from January 20 to February 19. Advance tickets are on sale now ($15 suggested donation); some pay-what-you-wish tickets will be available at the door for each performance.
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