Jefferson Mays — the actor who has made a career of one-actor, many-character work, from I Am My Own Wife through A Christmas Carol through the multi-role tour de force in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder — is returning to Broadway in a one-actor show this fall.
The show is not another multi-character vehicle. It’s a chamber piece. Single character, single arc, 95 minutes without interval.
The producers announced Monday that Mays will star in The Disappearing Hand, a new play by Lucinda Park (whose 2024 Atlantic Theater piece Northings drew a Pulitzer finalist nod) adapting the previously-unstaged 1873 memoir of a Boston phrenologist who, late in life, turned on his own profession. The play has been workshopping for three seasons at the O’Neill.
The casting is interesting partly because of what Mays isn’t doing. There are no quick-changes. No accents. No moustache work. “I’ve been doing the plural for twenty years,” Mays said in a brief statement. “I wanted to remember what the singular feels like.”
The production opens 14 October at the Booth Theatre. Director Sarah Benson (The Whale, Hadestown off-Broadway) makes her Broadway debut. Designer Lap Chi Chu — who lit Hadestown — returns to the building for the first time since 2019.
Ticket on-sale Monday 4 May. Limited 16-week engagement.