News

It was in the midst of the presidential debates of 2016, and Robert Schenkkan was alarmed. Though both the pundits and the polls seemed to assure that Hillary Clinton would soon become the 45th president of the United States, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist felt that the rabidly racist, anti-immigrant cant that spewed from the mouth of the Republican nominee had already brought familiar if discredited ideologies, supposedly long ago settled by war and safely consigned to the past, harrowingly close to the highest office in the land. So Schenkkan, perhaps best known for The Kentucky Cycle, his epic nine-play saga of three Appalachian families’ violent and avaricious quest for the American Dream, sat down to write. One week later, he had the first draft of Building the Wall. The playwright believed that his taut political suspense drama, which fast-forwards Trump’s immigration policy of mass arrests and deportations to the incarceration of several million detainees, would be merely a dark cautionary tale of dystopian fiction, a national bullet narrowly averted. With November’s electoral upset, however, Schenkkan’s speculative chiller had suddenly taken a leap towards becoming real. To read more, click here.

The Great Society, Robert Schenkkan’s follow-up to his enormously successful All the Way, will run between February 2 and March 18 of next year. In The Great Society, the wily, larger-than-life Lyndon B. Johnson simultaneously tries to prosecute an unpopular war and advance a historic social program while running a racially fraught nation. “[The Great Society is] impressive in its scope, surprisingly energetic and shines a bright, clear light on a pivotal moment in American history, as postwar optimism began to dim, as cracks in the polity became ever more apparent,” Charles Isherwood of the New York Times said. “I came away more impressed than I was with ‘All the Way’ — and, ultimately, more moved.” Kyle Donnelly, who direct All the Way at Arena last year, will direct this year, and Jack Willis returns as Lyndon Johnson. To read more, click here.

Two Academy Award winners – and Best Picture nominees – were released on disc by Lionsgate just before the Oscars and promptly vaulted to the top of the national home video sales charts the week ended Feb. 26. “Hacksaw Ridge,” the Mel Gibson-directed biopic of a pacifist war medic that won Oscars for Best Achievement in Film Editing and Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, debuted at No. 1 on both the NPD VideoScan overall disc sales chart, which tracks combined DVD and Blu-ray Disc sales, and NPD’s dedicated Blu-ray Disc Sales chart. To read more, click here.

"Hacksaw Ridge" won the Oscar for film editing.

Other nominees include:

Joe Walker, “Arrival”

Jake Roberts, "Hell or High Water"

Tom Cross, “La La Land”

Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon, “Moonlight”