About the Play:

Benefactors is a full-length comedic drama by Michael Frayn. An architect's decision to build a development in a slum in South London is mocked by his journalist friend, as both men and their wives look at the state of their ideals and their marriages. Benefactors is a poignant look at friendship and betrayal by the author of the Broadway hits Copenhagen and Noises Off.

Benefactors is about an architect charged with building a major development and the project's impact on his family and friends. The play investigates the various resonances of the term "planned community," an an urban architect attempts to improve humanity by the environments he creates, only leads to chaos when the high-rise boom goes bust and two close friends are caught in the cross-hairs. Conjures a world of the suburbs touched by politics and social indictments of the way people and systems undermine other people's best efforts.

Benefactors premiered in 1984 at London's Vaudeville Theatre and won the Standard, Plays and Players and Laurence Olivier awards for the Best Play of Year before transferring in 1985 to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway. This long-running hit starred Sam Waterston and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. The play has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"One of the subtlest plays Broadway has seen in years, by one of the most extraordinary writers of the English speaking theater." — Newsweek

"A high point of the theater season." — The Wall Street Journal

"Dazzling and devastating ... This prismatic work circumscribes the disillusionment of an era." — The New York Times

"A tour de force." — Christian Science Monitor

About the Playwright:

Michael Frayn has written plays, novels, and screenplays, in addition to being a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and translator of Chekhov. His thirteen plays include Copenhagen, which was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards and, in the United Kingdom, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards. His novel Headlong was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Born in London in 1933 and educated at Cambridge, Frayn is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin; they live in London.