Pretty, Pretty Good: Larry David to Star in New Broadway Play
UPDATE: Fish in the Dark will begin previews on February 2nd at the Cort Theater and open on March 5th, according to the New York Times. Rosie Perez and Jerry Adler are among cast members who have been added to the play.
Larry David will follow up his disastrous-turned-triumphant fictional Broadway debut in The Producers — as seen in Season Four of Curb Your Enthusiasm — with his actual Broadway debut on March 5th, 2015 when the comedian’s first play, Fish in the Dark, opens, The New York Times reports.
The Curb star and Seinfeld co-creator/head writer said the play was a comedy about a family member’s death, inspired not by The Producers arc, but by the passing of a friend’s father. David said he didn’t plan on starring in the show, but producer Scott Rudin convinced him to take on what David said will be his first stage gig since eighth grade.
“I thought it would be pretty cool to write a play someday,” he said. “I didn’t think it’d be pretty cool to be in it. It’s not like I would go to the theater and look up on stage and say, ‘I could be in that.’ I didn’t think of myself playing the character, but of course I write characters very close to me.”
There are about 15 characters in the show, and David described the one he’ll be playing, perhaps unsurprisingly, as “somebody very similar to Larry David — it might even be Larry David with a different name.” No other decisions have been made regarding the cast, however David did officially deny rumors that Jerry Seinfeld was involved.
Fish in the Dark will be directed by Anna D. Shapiro, who won the Tony for Best Director of a Play for her work on 2008’s August: Osage County, and scored a hit in 2011 with the Tony-nominated The Motherfucker With the Hat, which was also produced by Rudin (the pair will see their latest project, This Is Our Youth, open on August 18th). Fish in the Dark will run at a Shubert theater, which will be announced at a later date.
As for the return of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which hasn’t aired a new episode since 2011, David said it’s still possible the hit HBO show will come back for another season, but he wasn’t about to make a decision right now. “But if I did do another season, this play would push that schedule back,” he added.
While the future of Curb remains uncertain, David recently revisited his work on Seinfeld in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, during which he recalled NBC’s initial reaction to one of the show’s most famous episodes, “The Chinese Restaurant”: “Well… NBC didn’t want to run that show, and they changed the order that it was written in,” David said. “I think it was supposed to go much earlier, but they delayed it. They didn’t like it. In fact, when I was called in for a meeting after that season, they said that they didn’t want to have any more shows like that one. And of course, the very next season, we gave them ‘The Parking Garage.’ [Laughs] So, so much for that.”