The Cover Up, a new play by Jon Marans about Watergate, will have an invite-only reading at the Barrow Group theater on Monday, November 3 at 2 p.m.
It is directed by Nina Goodheart (Off-Broadway credits include: Road Kills, cityscrape, cunnicularii). She is the Co-founder of the theater company Good Apples Collective recently hailed as part of the “next great leap in theater.”
The Cover Up is set in Staunton, Virginia, 1973. While the Watergate hearings are being broadcast on television, Portland Lipper is in the middle of her own cover-up. Two years earlier, her brilliant, then 20-year-old daughter Floye Marie became schizophrenic.
Since then she’s been hiding her daughter’s illness, determined to help her graduate from UVA. However, Floye Marie’s failing her final course on Machiavelli. Portland enlists the aid of her unstable but brilliant ex-husband, Ronner, to save the day. Floye Marie — whose schizophrenia involves hearing voices – still hopes to be the first republican female president and has ‘conjured up’ Richard Nixon to give her guidance throughout her difficult times.
The reading cast stars Jeremy Shamos (Tony nominated for Clybourne Park, Here We Are, Glengarry Glen Ross with Al Pacino, Only Murders in the Building, The Gilded Age, Better Call Saul) as Richard Nixon. Shamos is joined by Geneva Carr (Hand to God, BULL); Steve Rosen (Spamalot, Peter and the Starcatcher); Rachel Ravel; Rebecca Salzhauer; and D.B. Milliken (Off-Broadway: Road Kills, cunnicularii).