"The Norwegians" Brings Impossibly Polite Hitmen to Shakespeare & Company

September 4–October 4, 2pm and 7pm | Lenox, MA

Shakespeare & Company opens "The Norwegians" at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre on September 4, running through October 4. Written by C. Denby Swanson and directed by James Warwick, the play is set in a Minneapolis bar where two women reeling from romantic betrayal—Betty and Olive—hatch an unlikely plan: hiring a pair of Norwegian hitmen to deal with the men who wronged them. The hitmen who show up, Tor and Gus, turn out to be unfailingly polite, disarmingly gentle, and almost aggressively nice, and the play finds its comedy in the collision between the women's simmering rage and the killers' relentless courtesy.

Swanson, a graduate of Smith College and the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers, has been a Jerome Fellow and William Inge Playwright in Residence, with commissions from the Guthrie Theater and prior work developed at Portland Center Stage's JAW Festival, among others; her play "The Potato Feast" won a Susan Smith Blackburn Special Prize in 2008. Director James Warwick brings decades of stage and screen credits from London's West End, Broadway, and regional theaters across the country, plus seven prior seasons directing at Shakespeare & Company.

The cast pairs two longtime company veterans as the leads: Elizabeth Aspenlieder, who has appeared in more than 40 Shakespeare & Company productions and won an Elliot Norton Award for her solo performance in "Bad Dates," plays Betty; Peggy Pharr Wilson, an associate artist at Barrington Stage Company across 25 productions and co-author of the cult hit "Six Women with Brain Death," plays Olive. Michael F. Toomey, a 20-year Shakespeare & Company member and founding member of Split Knuckle Theatre, plays Tor, while Mark Zeisler—whose Broadway credits include the Tony-winning revival of "A View from the Bridge" and recurring television roles on "Bull," "House of Cards," and "The Americans"—plays Gus.

Performances run at 2pm and 7pm throughout the run.

Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA. Tickets at ci.ovationtix.com.