In this hilarious and poignant new play, Doug, a blue collar worker at a family owned construction company is charged with training Paul, the boss’s gentle, secretive, college bound son during the course of a summer demolition project. Doug feels needed to help the boy get ready for life away from home. Their exchanges begin hilariously with Doug’s baudy advice comically at odds with Paul’s shy nature. As things proceed, we come to realize that Paul is struggling with something far beyond Doug’s purview and experience.  A play about identity, truth, parenthood, and courage. 

Inspired by Nicolai Gogol’s famous short story, Wolf Mankowitz’s The Bespoke Overcoat is by turns a deeply comic and unforgettably poignant reimagining of Gogol’s most famous classic tale, The Overcoat. Reset by Mankowitz into the Jewish East End of London, this story about an old clerk who can’t afford a new overcoat is a tale of love and resilience told with dignity and humor. Immediately hailed as one of Britain’s most exciting young playwrights when the play opened in London in 1953, Mankowitz adapted it into a film that won the Oscar at the 29th Academy Awards for Best Short Subject Film in 1957. The son of a Jewish bookseller in London’s East End, Mankowitz was a prolific dramatist, novelist, and screenwriter often known for depicting acts of humanity in a flawed but facinating world.

Winner of the 2013 Tony award, Durang’s play is set in an old farm house in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, where two siblings (Vanya and Sonia) toil away in mourning for their lives as they recover from 15 years of caretaking for their dementia-suffering professorial parents, who had clearly had a penchant for Chekhov during their lives. Their prophesying housekeeper Cassandra peppers Vanya and Sonia’s existence with foreboding warnings. Enter movie star and successful sister Masha, with her new love, Spike, and a lovely young actress from across the pond-and the play explodes into rivalries young and old.