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Directed by Wilson Milam (Tony-nominated for directing the Broadway production of this play), the cast of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” features (in alphabetical order) Ian Alda, Andrew Connolly, Coby Getzug, Seán G. Griffin, Kevin Kearns, Zoe Perry, Chris Pine and Brett Ryback. The scenic designer for “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” is Laura Fine Hawkes, the costume designer is Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, the lighting designer is Brian Gale and the sound designer is Cricket S. Myers. Casting is by Erika Sellin and the production stage manager is David S. Franklin.

“The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” by Academy Award-winning, Olivier Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Martin McDonagh, is a blistering, graphic satire on violence set in 1993 on the rocky island of Inishmore. Padraic (Pine), a hard-boiled terrorist, has been away in Northern Ireland with his busy schedule of torture and assorted nationalist mayhem, but he is lured home to Inishmore by the news that his beloved cat, Wee Thomas, is doing poorly. When Padraic finds out Wee Thomas has been murdered, he initiates a cycle of revenge-killing that threatens everyone in his path, except perhaps the love-struck Mairead (Zoe Perry), a 16-year-old terrorist groupie with a BB gun.

When “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” was presented in 2006 at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, Ben Brantley of The New York Times said that the play is “. . . brazenly and unapologetically a farce, but it is also a severely moral play, translating into dizzy absurdism the self-perpetuating spirals of political violence that now occur throughout the world . . . [it is] directed with a steady gaze and acute theatrical instinct by Wilson Milam.” Michael Billington of The Guardian remarked of the earlier London production, “. . . a boldly brilliant play about the way rigid adherence to a cause destroys a sense of proportion . . . Like all first-rate satire, the play attacks excess and endorses reason.”

Center Theatre Group, a non-profit organization, is one of the largest and most active theatre companies in the nation, programming seasons at the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center of Los Angeles, and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. In addition to providing theatre of the highest caliber to the rich, diverse communities of Southern California, CTG supports a significant number of arts education and play development initiatives.
Tickets for “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” are available by calling CTG Audience Services at (213) 628-2772 or online at www.CenterTheatreGroup.org or in person at the CTG box office located at the Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center.

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Gallery Link:
- Photo Sessions > Session #028

I’ve updated the entire Cliff Watts photoshoot from the original medium quality sizes to high quality. Believe me, no matter how many times you’ve seen them they are much more enticing in high quality

Gallery Links:
- Photo Sessions > Session #022

The cast of “Farragut North” poses for a group photo at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles Tuesday, June 23, 2009. From left, front row, are Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chris Noth, Olivia Thirlby and Chris Pine. Back, from left, are Justin Huen, director Doug Hughes, writer Beau Willimon, Mia Barron and Dan Bittner.

Gallery Link: Photo Sessions > Session #027

Thanks to Leeanne for bringing this to my attention!

“I’m going to struggle and try my best to search out the roles that are a little more interesting and not based on how good your tan looks and how coiffed your hair is,” Pine said on the eve of the Geffen Playhouse’s production of “Farragut North,” a tense political drama costarring Pine and “Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth, opening Wednesday.

“There’s a battle between commerce and art that I’m learning that doesn’t necessarily have to prevent you from pursuing more artistic ventures, as long as you utilize your commerce, knowing you’re using it to get more opportunities to do the smaller pet projects,” he said. “I’m so new at it, I’m just learning to navigate the waters.”

So Pine, 28, has been studying the log of such other captains of his industry as Paul Newman. He says the late actor is his role model “in terms of longevity and the good he was able to do in the world.”

Pine’s other American idols?

“George Clooney, for the conversation about commerce and art. Daniel Day-Lewis for his almost monkish pursuit of protecting artistic integrity, which I’m in sheer awe of. I would certainly love to be held in the kind of esteem he is. Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, I’ve had an acting crush on for years. I’m all over the spectrum.”

Not really, if you consider the fact that all those performers are acclaimed for their acting chops. That’s clearly a goal of Pine’s and one he thinks he can balance with blockbuster films like “Trek.” That’s why his first role after the mega popcorn movie is the dark and complicated spinmeister Stephen of Beau Willimon’s “Farragut North,” named for the Washington, D.C., subway stop near the vortex of lobbyists’ offices.

source: latimes.com

Anyhow I’m excited to have uploaded outtakes from Chris’s Mens Health photoshoot taken by photographer Art Streiber, thanks to Andreas for these. And lastly the awesome Faith of a fellow Chris Pine fansite: ChrisPineFan.com letting me share these!

Gallery Link: Photo Sessions > Session #019

Gallery Link: Photo Sessions > Session #017

Gallery Link: Photo Sessions > Session #026

Pine, 28, costars with ” Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth as media massagers in the psychological drama inspired by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, which briefly claimed the energies of the playwright and recovering politico Beau Willimon. Pine plays Stephen, a wunderkind press secretary who prides himself on his ability to manipulate any situation.

At the moment, Stephen is trying to work his magic on an attractive young intern played by ” Juno’s” Olivia Thirlby, who was in the New York production’s original cast last fall. In a Geffen rehearsal room, under the watchful eye of director Doug Hughes (who also helmed the current Mark Taper Forum production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna”), Molly/Olivia has just entered to drop off an envelope for Stephen/Chris at a dingy restaurant in East Des Moines, Iowa, where he’s making calls. And now he’s trying to beguile her into sticking around for a drink.

The characters play a flirtatious game of verbal ping-pong, and then Pine suddenly mimes reeling in Thirlby as if she’s on the end of an invisible hook. Hughes is delighted. “Your silver-tongued eloquence claims another helpless victim,” he says.


Pine’s smile grows even broader. “It’s just another day, Doug,” he replies.

Pine may be self-mocking when he says that, but then that’s part of the charm that got him into this enviable position in the first place. Directors and writers who’ve worked with him quickly volunteer that he’s a great guy to have around, not an overgrown enfant terrible like so many other young lions of Hollywood who will go unnamed.

When “Star Trek” director J.J. Abrams cast him in the pivotal role of Capt. Kirk, the filmmaker was looking for “a relative unknown who had to behave as if he were an experienced movie star without any of the negatives of being a big movie star,” he said. “He had to treat the cast and crew in a way that would make the other actors feel safe and the crew feel appreciated. And he was impeccable.”

Add a wicked sense of humor and piercing blue eyes, and it’s easy to see how Pine has burst onto the scene as one of the action heroes of summer. What may be less obvious is why he took the dark and relatively low-profile stage role of Stephen, who personifies “Farragut North’s” catchphrase that it’s a play “about the lust for power and the costs one will endure to achieve it.” (Warner Bros. is developing the film version, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star and George Clooney to direct.)

“I was in a hotel room with my girlfriend at the time, and I had a bunch of scripts to read — film and theater — and I saved it for last because I’d heard it was really good, and I wanted to end my night on a good note, being excited,” Pine says of his early-spring decision to take the part during a lull in the “Star Trek” publicity grind. “I couldn’t put it down. The twist at the end completely threw me. I thought Beau’s sense of dialogue was so right on and so — I don’t want to say real, because that’s dumb — but real without being affected, and intelligent, but not so intelligent to make you feel like a dumbass. And I’m very interested in the world of politics, so it appealed to me on that end.”

As Pine discusses the play during a break in rehearsal at the Geffen, his mind and body seem to be in constant motion. He alternately scratches his side and reaches for the coffee table as he mulls over certain questions, waiting for the right answer to finish percolating. He’s casually dressed in a blue button-down shirt, black jeans and high-top sneakers and a new beard. The facial fuzz was inspired by Willimon’s hirsute college buddy and political mentor, Jay Carson, who worked for Hillary and Bill and, at only 26, served as Dean’s national spokesman in 2004.

Pine is trying on the beard to see if it helps him penetrate Stephen’s miserable je ne sais quoi. He acknowledges that he’s not quite there yet.

“I’m having a hard time not judging him,” he says. “But there’s a primal drive in him to win at all costs that I’m coming to understand. That need comes from all the damage that all of us carry in one form or another. It’s just his ability to screw other people over, it’s that Machiavellian politician in him. . . . Once I can pinpoint that, I’ll be able to take it, hopefully, to a different level. But it sure is a lot of fun.”

Not just guy candy

In fact, the dark Stephen is just as much a typical Chris Pine role as the stellar Kirk is. His brief career has already swept the spectrum of characters, from heroes to antiheroes.

And for the most part, the dividing line is the one that separates film and theater.

Pine’s first big-screen role was as an arm charm for Anne Hathaway in 2004′s “Princess Diaries 2,” a service he also provided Lindsay Lohan’s character in 2006 in “Just My Luck.” He quickly moved on to the young hero role in the 2008 film ” Bottle Shock,” in which, as with “Star Trek,” he played a hapless young man who tries to live up to his father’s legacy (a scion of the family business much like Pine himself, the son of “CHiPs” veteran Robert Pine and TV actress Gwynne Gilford, and a third-generation thespian from what he calls “a working-class Hollywood” family, presumably because they literally worked).

Yet one of Pine’s favorite film roles was not a lead but rather the “redneck neo-Nazi hit man” of 2006′s “Smokin’ Aces.” And while he was becoming better known for his good-guy film parts, he was earning critics’ notice in much darker roles onstage, such as the vicious Carter in Neil LaBute’s “Fat Pig” at the Geffen in 2007 and the amoral journalist of Ronan Noone’s 2006 one-man drama “The Atheist” in New York.

Of Pine’s work in “Fat Pig,” LaBute says: “He had what I felt would have worked for either of the male characters in that piece — the good guy or the bad guy. He had a watchability. I think he isn’t looking at [his career situation] as, ‘I have this chance of being a star.’ He knows a good role is a good role, and if it’s a bad guy, they often get the best lines. It’s great to see him going off to do a piece of theater. He’s approaching it as, ‘What is the best material I have at the moment?’ “

Willimon thinks the pattern of Pine’s acting credits reflects the opportunities available to a young guy with leading-man looks, and “it doesn’t have as much to do with Chris Pine as it does with the chasm between theater and film,” he says. “In general, film — particularly Hollywood films — tend to lean more toward the good hero who overcomes obstacles and comes out on top. Theater, largely because it doesn’t bear the same commercial burden that film does, has the luxury and the bravery to take on risks and support the other sort of heroes — call it the antihero. Sometimes obstacles do not result in a happy ending — or a more complex ending than triumph.”

In August, Pine moves on to his own happy ending when he starts filming 20th Century Fox’s “Unstoppable” with Denzel Washington. In the thriller directed by Tony Scott, he and Washington will play conductors trying to stop a runaway train carrying toxic chemicals. It’s probably reasonable to assume that there are a couple of hero roles in there somewhere.

Pine seems gobsmacked about the opportunity to work with the two-time Oscar winner, an experience he anticipates will be tantamount to earning an acting PhD. “I don’t ever want to be so precious to eschew those kinds of roles because I’m on some mission to be the artiste in Hollywood,” says Pine, who credits his family with keeping his feet on the ground. “But I think there’s a closeted Peter Lorre inside me that loves to play the fun, darker, weirder roles that hopefully I’ll get the chance to play as I move ahead in my career.”

source: latimes.com