Holiday Hurdles

Michael Cerveris is the Tony Award–winning star of Fun Home and Assassins. Additional Broadway credits include Sweeney Todd, The Who's Tommy, Evita, Titanic, LoveMusik, Road Show, Nine Lives, Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), and many others. Off-broadway, he has appeared in King Lear, Cymbeline, Hedda Gabler, and Nassim. Additional film and television credits include Fringe, Treme, Madam Secretary, The Good Wife, Detours, The Tick, Gotham, Mosaic, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Elementary, Mindhunter, The Blacklist, Evil, The Plot Against America, Queen of the South, Evil, and Billions. Fresh off a turn as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Musical Christmas Carol at the Pittsburgh CLO, he can currently be seen as Watson in the The Gilded Age. Cerveris also works as a musician, both solo and with his band, Loose Cattle.

Allegra Goodman’s novels include The Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls, which was a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion, and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a Ph.D in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. Her most recent novel, Sam, was released in January.

Dana Ivey is a five-time Tony Award nominee who has appeared on Broadway in numerous productions, including The Importance of Being Earnest, Butley, The Rivals, Henry IV, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Sunday in the Park with George, and Heartbreak House. She also earned Drama Desk Awards for her roles in The Last Night of Ballyhoo and Sex and Longing. Her television credits include a starring role in Easy Street and appearances on Law & Order, Frasier, Oz, Sex and the City, Monk, Ugly Betty, Boardwalk Empire, and Madam Secretary. Ivey has appeared in numerous films, including The Color Purple, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Sabrina, The Addams Family, Sleepless in Seattle, The Help, The Leisure Seeker, and Ocean’s Eight. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2008.

Richard Masur is recognized for a variety of roles over his 45-year career on TV series including The Hot l Baltimore, One Day at a Time, Rhoda, and more recently, Transparent, Girls, Younger, The Good Wife/Fight, Bull, The Equalizer, and Kaleidoscope. Additional television, miniseries, and movie credits include Fallen Angel, Adam, The Burning Bed, It, And the Band Played On, 61*, and this year’s The Girls on the Bus on HBO Max. He has appeared in more than 60 feature films, including The Thing, Heartburn, Risky Business, My Girl, License to Drive, Tumbledown, Lonely Boys, Don’t Think Twice, Hudson, Before/During/After, and Another Year Together. Masur’s stage work includes Lucky Guy, Democracy, and The Changing Room on Broadway. Off-Broadway, Sarah, Sarah; The Ruby Sunrise; Fetch Clay, Make Man; Relevance; and Two Jews, Talking; among others.

Isaiah Sheffer (1935 – 2012) was a writer, director, cultural entrepreneur, and impresario. He was co-founder of Symphony Space in New York City, served as the organization’s Artistic Director until 2010 and Founding Artistic Director thereafter, and was widely known as the host of Selected Shorts. In addition, he was the creator of Wall to Wall and Bloomsday on Broadway, as well as the co-creator of The Thalia Follies political cabaret.

David Sedaris is a humorist, author, comedian, and radio contributor. He is the author of The Best of Me, Calypso,Theft By Finding, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is also the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris’s pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and have twice been included in The Best American Essays. His original radio pieces can be heard on This American Life, and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. Sedaris and his sister Amy have collaborated on several plays under the name “The Talent Family,” including Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz. In 2013, A feature film adaptation of his story “C.O.G.” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the art book David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium was published in 2017. He is currently on a national book tour for his most recent novels, Happy-go-Lucky and A Carnival of Snackery.

Jeanette Winterson’s works include the short story collections Hansel and Greta: A Fairy Tale Revolution, The World and Other Places and Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days and the novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Written on the Body, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, The Stone Gods, and most recently, Frankissstein: A Love Story. Her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, was published in 2012. Winterson has been honored with England’s Whitbread Prize, the LAMBDA Literary Award, the American Academy’ s E. M. Forster Award, and the Prix d’argent at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2018, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for her services to literature. Her most recent novel, Night Side of the River, was released in October of this year.

Tobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and Our Story Begins, which won The Story Prize for 2008. Additional honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award—both for excellence in the short story —the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of The Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines and literary journals.

CREDITS

"Powder," by Tobias Wolff, from The Night in Question (Knopf, 1996). Copyright © 1996 by Tobias Wolff. Used by permission of the author.

“Gifts of the Jewish Magi” by Allegra Goodman. Copyright © 2013 by Allegra Goodman. Used by permission of the author.

“Christmas in New York” by Jeanette Winterson, from Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days (Grove Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Jeannette Winterson. Used by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop Ltd.