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8/8/08 - New York Times - Tryst
Moving From One Barn to Another
by Anita Gates
Joe Brancato clearly has a thing about barns.
When he was a boy, he used to do the Mickey-and-Judy thing and put on shows in one across the street from his home. This wasn’t easy, because Mr. Brancato grew up in the Bronx. (But in the 1960s, a few remnants of the borough’s farmland past were still around.)
As a young Rockland County, N.Y., schoolteacher, he spotted an 1880s hay barn in Stony Point, turned it into a theater and founded the Penguin Repertory Company, now winding up its 31st season. And this month he is fulfilling a longtime dream by directing at the Westport Country Playhouse, perhaps Connecticut’s best-known glamour barn, where he used to see shows in his youth.
“The theater that’s now is a gem,” Mr. Brancato said, referring to the glamorous (but still barn-style) building that opened after a $17.5 million renovation completed in 2005. “The theater before was more rough-hewn, and it was that theater that I always fantasized about someday doing a production in.”
The play that has brought him back to Westport is Karoline Leach’s “Tryst,” a two-character British thriller starring Mark Shanahan as a sexy Edwardian con man and Andrea Maulella as a milliner’s assistant with low self-esteem and a desirable nest egg.

New York Times
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