A sexually charged and wickedly funny thriller, HARRY CLARKE is the story of a shy midwestern man leading an outrageous double life as the cocky Londoner Harry Clarke. Moving to New York City and presenting himself as an Englishman, he charms his way into a wealthy family’s life as the seductive and precocious Harry, whose increasingly risky and dangerous behavior threatens to undo more than his persona. This riveting one-man play by Obie Award-winning writer David Cale (LILLIAN) and helmed by Obie Award-winning director Leigh Silverman (VIOLET) will star Tony Award-winning actor Billy Crudup (THE COAST OF UTOPIA, Spotlight, Vineyard’s THE METAL CHILDREN) in a tour-de-force performance.

An Edward Hopper painting I couldn’t quite place stuck in my mind when I watched David Cale’s new, one-man play, Harry Clarke — the first show of The Vineyard Theatre’s 35th Anniversary Season. I was thinking, an exhaustive Google search turned up on my commute home, of People In the Sun, a later-in-life work by the famous American painter. Now, it’s not quite a match. In the painting, men and women sit in deck chairs on a white terrace, staring out into an impressive vista. In Harry Clarke, a dark wooden deck, adorned with a matching chair and small table, serves as the stage. But it disappears into the same, vast sky, touched with dabs of color, beautiful and imposing. And it is this same, enigmatic American heartland that birthed Harry Clarke. Harry Clarke, who was once Philip Brugglestein, a middle-class kid from South Bend, Indiana, with an alcoholic, bullying father and a passive mother, yearning for something more exciting. A kid who’s sure, “I could be myself if I had an English accent.” At 18, when his father dies in a freak accident, Philip sells his childhood home and heads straight for New York City, where he walks the streets and indulges his hobbies of reading crime t …Read more