Int'l City Theatre Presents 'Park Your Car' 5/2-5/25

Joseph Ruskin and Jacqueline Schultz star in Israel Horovitz's humorous and poignant pas-de-deux, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, at International City Theatre.  Hope Alexander directs the four-week run at ICT's home in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, May 2 through May 25.  Low-priced previews begin April 29.

In Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, Jacob Brackish is in the last years of his life.  As a younger man, Jacob was the toughest, meanest teacher to ever set foot in Gloucester High.  When a mousey, middle-aged woman answers the ad he places for a housekeeper, Jacob doesn't recognize the student he flunked years before.  Nor does he remember that he also flunked her mother.  And her father.  And her deceased husband.

She's hostile and vindictive.  He's cynical, imperious and cantankerous.  She's a blue-collar Irish Catholic with a mess of relatives and a poor grasp of syntax.  He's a Harvard-educated Ph.D., a Jewish bachelor with no family.  The joy of Horovitz's touching, funny and always entertaining play is in watching how this odd couple manages, in the end, to make contact and discover their common humanity.

Park Your Car in Harvard Yard had its New York premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1984, after successful preliminary productions in Los Angeles and Gloucester, MA.  Seven years later, it ran for 124 performances on Broadway, starring Judith Ivey and Jason Robards.

Award-winning actor/director Hope Alexander has directed many plays by Horovitz, including critically acclaimed productions of Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, Fighting Over Beverley, Unexpected Tenderness and the trio of plays known as Horovitz's "Growing Up Jewish" cycle.

In 1998 Horovitz told the Los Angeles Times that he trusts Alexander "as much as I do anybody... and more than I would most directors that I've worked with."

One of America's most celebrated dramatists, Israel Horovitz has written more than 50 produced plays, many of which have been translated and performed in more than 25 languages worldwide. Among his best-known plays are Line (the longest running play in Off-Off Broadway history, now in its 35th year of continuous performance at off-Broadway's 13th Street Repertory Theatre), Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, The Primary English Class, The Widow's Blind Date and The Indian Wants the Bronx, for which he won the OBIE Award for Best Play.  His 1982 film Author! Author!, starring Al Pacino, is a largely autobiographical account of a playwright dealing with the stress of having his play produced on Broadway while trying to raise a large family.  Other Horovitz films include the award-winning Sunshine, co-written with Istvan Szabo (European Academy Award - Best Screenplay); 3 Weeks After Paradise (which he directed and in which he starred); James Dean, an award-winning biography of the actor; and The Strawberry Statement (Prix du Jury, Cannes Film festival, 1970), a movie adapted from a journalistic novel by James Simon Kunen that deals with the student political unrest of the 1960s.

Hope Alexander started her career at The San Francisco Actor's Workshop, where she was the youngest apprentice in that company's history. She has been a working member of the theater community for over forty years. Her work as a director has taken her from Costa Mesa, California (South Coast Repertory Theatre: True West, Play Strindberg) to Paris, France (Le Petit Herbertot Theatre, Tennessee Williams's The Two Character Play with Robert Symonds and Priscilla Pointer). A multiple Drama-Logue and Critic's Circle Award winner, some of her other directing favorites include: Last List of My Mad Mother, Hudson Theatre; The Art of Dining, The Marin Theatre Company; The Glencarin Cycle, a series of Eugene O'Neill's sea plays performed onboard a 19th Century sailing schooner docked off of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco; and Snow White, written by her son Thorin Alexander and produced by The Falcon Theatre. For her own company, The Company Rep, Hope directed Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Criminal Minds, Camino Real, The Comedy of Errors, The Fantasticks, A Christmas Carol (also written by Thorin Alexander), Play Strindberg, The Nina Variations and the world premiere musical Rosenstrasse.

Joseph Ruskin and Jacqueline Schultz shared the International City Theatre stage in 2004 when she starred as Bessie Berger in Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing and he played the role of Jacob.

Mr. Ruskin has extensive theater credits on and off-Broadway and regionally.  At the Mark Taper Forum: Othello; The Dybbuk; Uncle Vanya; In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer; and Babbit, A Marriage.  Other Los Angeles area theaters: King Lear; Mornings At Seven; The Substance of Fire; Shayna Maidel; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; and The Tenth Man.  His film work includes Star-Trek IV:Insurrection; Prizzi's Honor; Indecent Proposal; Robin and The Seven Hoods; The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond; The Magnificent Seven; Scorpion King and Smokin' Aces.  On television, he has appeared in Alias; Star Trek (the original series and Next Generation); Voyager; Deep Space Nine; That's My Bush; ER; L.A. Law; Hill Street Blues; Brooklyn South; The Last Don; and many more.

Jacqueline Schultz recently was seen in To Kill a Mockingbird at International City Theatre in Long Beach.  She costarred in the hit West Coast premiere of String of Pearls at both the Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood and the Santa Barbara Theatre.  She appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse in the world premiere of Open Window.  She starred in the critically acclaimed Los Angeles premiere of Lee Blessing's Going to St. Ives at the Fountain Theatre (Best Actress nomination, NAACP Theatre Award) and at the International Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Other leading roles at the Fountain Theatre: After the Fall (Ovation Award, Best Production of the Year), The Road to Mecca; The Night of the Iguana; The Darker Face of the Earth; Fighting Over Beverley (L.A. Weekly Award); Duet for One (Ovation Award nomination, Best Actress); Ashes (Drama-Logue Award); The Golden Gate (Drama-Logue Award); and Orpheus Descending.  Other theater credits include: Sorrows and Rejoicings at the Mark Taper Forum; The Kennedy Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre (NY), and the Mark Taper Forum's New Works Festival.  TV credits include: The Practice; ER; My Wife and Kids; 7th Heaven; Crossing Jordan; Judging Amy; the HBO movie Tyson; and many more.

The set Designer for Park Your Car in Harvard Yard is John Iacovelli; Lighting Designer is Jared A. Sayeg; Costume Designer is Carin Jacobs; Sound Designer is Paul Fabre; Property Designers are Patty and Gordon Briles; Production Stage Manager is Michael Alan Ankney; Casting is by Michael Donovan Casting; and Shashin Desai produces for International City Theatre.

International City Theatre is the Resident Professional Theater at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, and the recipient of the Margaret Harford Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics' Circle for "Sustained Excellence in Theater."

Park Your Car in Harvard Yard runs Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm, May 2 through May 25.  Tickets are $32.00 and $37.00 on Thursdays, and $37.00 and $42.00 on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, except opening night which is $50.00 and $60.00 and includes a reception with the actors following the performance.  Preview performances take place on Tuesday, April 29; Wednesday, April 30; and Thursday, May 1 at 8 pm.  Preview tickets are $29.00.  International City Theatre is located in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center at 300 E. Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach.  For reservations and information, call the ICT Box Office at (562) 436-4610 or go to www.ictlongbeach.org .