‘The Columnist’ Fill Out Cast with Boyd Gaines, Margaret Colin

The Manhattan Theatre Club announced recently that Boyd Gaines and Margaret Colin will join John Lithgow in the cast of David Auburn’s “The Columnist.”

The drama will begin performances on Wednesday, April 4 at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, and will officially open on April 25.

In the production, Colin will play Susan Alsop, the wife of Lithgow’s Joseph Alsop. Lithgow’s character plays a powerful political columnist in 1960s America, and the play focuses the political drama he becomes involved in as America goes though many changes throughout that decade. Gaines will play Joseph Alsop’s brother, Stewart.

The play’s production notes describe the drama like this:

Columnists are kings in mid-century America and Joseph Alsop (Tony and Emmy Award winner John Lithgow) wears the crown. Joe is beloved, feared and courted in equal measure by the Washington political world at whose center he sits. But as the ‘60s dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political drama Joe is embroiled in becomes deeply personal as well.

David Auburn is best known for his 2000 play “Proof,” which won both the Tony Award for Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Daniel J. Sullivan, who directed “Proof,” also will work with Auburn again to direct “The Columnist.”

Gaines is a four-time Tony Award winner known for his work in “Gypsy” and “Contact,” and Colin is a two-time Drama Desk Award nominee. In addition to her work both on Broadway and Off Broadway in productions like “Defiance,” “Pschopathia Sexualis” and “Sight Unseen,” she also is known as a co-star on the television shows “Gossip Girl” and “Now and Again.”

John Lithgow won his first Tony Award, the Best Actor Featured in a Play, for 1973’s “The Changing Room.” His most recent Tony, for Best Actor in a Musical, came in 2005 for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.