from an anonymous source
One of my favorite stage memories is seeing Erin do two topless scenes (and some very vigorous simulated sex) in a 1999 Off-Broadway comedy called "Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight." She has a killer body. My guess is there'll be nothing this time... but with Erin, I always hold out hope. She's one of my longtime favorites.
I just saw what you posted about "Things You Shouldn't Say..." becoming a series! Wow, that is too weird. Erin played the role in the original production. The nudity didn't last too long, but it was choice.
Had my first costume fitting for BOARDWALK EMPIRE. Have been cast as in a reoccurring role in the final season and am honored. so honored.
— Erin Dilly (@ECDilly) March 15, 2014@ECDilly I'm so excited for you Mrs. Thompson!!
— john treacy egan (@egantreacyj) March 23, 2014just wept reading the script for my first episode on BOARDWALK...these people can WRITE. beyond excited and beyond blessed.
— Erin Dilly (@ECDilly) March 25, 2014Table read for BOARDWALK. So incredibly grateful. pic.twitter.com/HHuVgfpdH2
— Erin Dilly (@ECDilly) March 27, 2014Am so excited to start work on BOARDWALK...am binge consuming the series now and completely blown away by its ingenuity and authenticity.
— Erin Dilly (@ECDilly) March 19, 2014
Sex Comedy Really Is Funny and Sexy
MARY CAMPBELL , Associated PressMay. 13, 1999
NEW YORK (AP) _ Experienced theatergoers have come to expect any play called a sex comedy to be neither sexy nor funny. ``Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight'' is a brightly fresh, wildly funny exception.
The play, by actor Peter Ackerman, opened Thursday at the off-Broadway Promenade Theater. With six names listed in the theater program, the audience expects three couples to act out the play's title. A bed slides out to stage center, a couple huddling under the covers.
Ben (Mark Kassen) sits up. An argument follows, with lines closer to ``The Honeymooners'' than to reality. Finally, Ben shouts ``Maybe I'm gay,'' and Nancy (Erin Dilly) heads into the night.
Scene 2 reveals the bedroom of Grace (Clea Lewis), in a nightgown, whose visitor for the fifth night running is Gene (Jeffrey Donovan). She wants to go to bed; he'd like to talk. Gene is the play's most intriguing character, unintentionally funny, an Italian working in an Italian organization. The most conventional thinker of the six, not college educated and wishing he were, he is often the one with the most sensible ideas. He's in love with Grace, a zany who just wants a fling.
In one of the play's surprises, Nancy bursts in on Grace and Gene for advice. They call Gene's brother Mark (Andrew Benator), a psychologist. His bed, shared with an older man (Nicholas Kepros), slides onto the stage.
Much advice gets tossed around via speakerphone. ``People don't always know what's best for them. That's what friends are for,'' pronounces Grace. Nancy phones Ben, putting everybody on the speakerphone. Ben repeats Nancy's words that upset him, eliciting much commentary, comic and, in Mark's case, insightful.
The evening's only nudity is briefly in the first scene. John Rando directed, keeping ``Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight'' jumping as the romp it is.
Exploring the Casualties Of Casual Conversation
THINGS YOU SHOULDN'T SAY PAST MIDNIGHT. "A Comedy in Three Beds" by Peter Ackerman, directed by John Rando. Set by Rob Odorisio, lighting by Donald Holder, costumes by Tom Broecker. Promenade Theatre, 2162 Broadway, Manhattan. Seen at Tuesday preview.
BACK IN the days of "Abie's Irish Rose," cross-cultural romances were dealt with in staid and gently comic fashion. Today, watch out for displays of nudity, ethnic insults intended to make your mouth drop and discussions of sexuality that cross all kinds of borders - good taste among them.
"Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight" is soft-core sitcom, a commercial entertainment that seeks to titillate sexually as well as tickle the funny bone. It's also Peter Ackerman's first produced play.
He apparently learned a lot about pushing the right buttons from an acting stint opposite Eli Wallach in "Visiting Mr. Green," another highly polished (but downright old-fashioned) comedy that shares some of the same concerns about tolerance.
Slickly directed by John Rando (who just finished staging "Do Re Mi" at City Center's Encores!), the play features three couples, two heterosexual and one homosexual, who copulate fiercely (mostly, but not always, under the covers) in three separate beds. Rob Odorisio's amusing set has the beds pop or slide out of a quilted wall that's studded with night-lights above and also opens to reveal closets, a kitchenette and spectacular views of Manhattan.
Couple number one are Ben (Mark Kassen), a Jewish graduate student, and Nancy, a non-Jewish cookbook editor, who have a fight after she blurts out a crass ethnic slur in the heat of passion. Nancy (played by the appealing Erin Dilly, last seen in the Encores!"Babes in Arms") runs off to see her best friend, the zany nymphomaniac Grace (Clea Lewis, who played Audrey on TV's "Ellen" for three seasons).
Grace is in bed with Gene (Jeffrey Donovan, very good as an uneducated but sensitive guy). Grace is turned on by Gene's job as a hit man - though working for the Dutch mob, he complains, gets him no
respect. Gene, a neat-freak who likes to line up his slippers precisely, wants a relationship deeper than plain lust. Grace doesn't. Making the sort of nonsensical decision only characters in certain TV programs and plays ever make, the trio calls Gene's brother, Mark (Andrew Benator), a therapist, even though it's 3 a.m., to get advice for Nancy. Mark, who is gay and has a penchant for much-older partners (70s and up), is in bed with a Mr. Abramson (Nicholas Kepros, who gets to drolly deliver a passel of self-deprecating old-man jokes). In yet another loony choice, the five of them (using three-way calling and a speaker phone) ring up Ben - remember him from couple number one? - to try to effect a reconciliation. Many of the jokes are funny - cute, you might say - and the show's frantic pace sets up a comic rhythm, though not steadily enough to make you wish for more. In fact, less would be fine. The play drives home its points, about religious and sexual differences and how language plays a part in relationships, relentlessly. Let's face it, there are many hurtful things we shouldn't say to other people even before midnight, and most of us know what they are.
Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight
 Erin Dilly and Mark Kassen in Bed #1 of Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight's 3 beds. |
The three sets of bed partners saying things they shouldn't say at three a.m. in the morning (you mean you're fast asleep at that hour?) include a Jewish graduate student Ben (Mark Kassen and his girl friend Nancy (Erin Dilly) who grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon a place not notable for its Jewish population; her sexually adventurous best friend Grace (Clea Lewis) and a straight-laced, upwardly mobile Italian hit man Gene (Jeffrey Donovan) plus his brother Mark who's also her therapist(Andrew Benator) and his much older Jewish lover Mr. Abramson (Nicholas Kepros).
The no-no words accompany much orgasmic writhing under bed covers that are tossed aside just often enough to titillate (especially easy for the great looking Dilly and Lewis and hunky Donovan). When couple number one, Nancy and Ben, reach their heights, she suddenly shouts "Do me, you hook nosed Jew!" Bingo. Ben tumbles off cloud nine and passion play becomes a verbal match that leads to hurt feelings, misunderstanding (about his sexual preferences as well as her possible anti-Semitism) and Nancy's departure.
As Ben's bed slides back into the padded red and blue wall of Rob Odorisio's ingeniously clever set, out comes another again backed by a window with a Manhattan skyline view gorgeously lit by Donald Holder. We're now in Grace's apartment and Ackerman repeats his coitus interruptus game to humorously poke fun at the traditional relationship in which men tend to be the sexual predators. Jeffrey Donovan plays Ackerman's wildly exaggerated "boy toy" gangster with a hilarious mix of sincerity and compulsive prissiness that make him most endearing. Clea Lewis is delightfully ditsy as the nymphomaniac who wants sex and nothing but sex from "clean Gene"
The third bed scenario features therapist Mark acting out his sexual tick (he's turned on by old men). with Mr. Abramson who hasn't come this close to sexual pleasure since 1962 and for whom "a minute is a precious commodity." Nicholas Krepos plays the senior citizen in the midst of these thirty-somethings with blatantly overstated and scene stealing relish.
Following up on Grace's theory that "people don't always know what's best for them. That's what friends are for." By the time all three beds and their occupants are interconnected by means of three-way speaker phones, it's clear that Nancy's if it's on your lung it's on your tongue hooked nose words are the playwright's open sesame for digging ever so lightly to those hidden parts of ourselves that we are generally loathe to allow out of the dark corners where they lurk.
The play drives home its points, about religious and sexual differences and how language plays a part in relationships, relentlessly. Let's face it, there are many hurtful things we shouldn't say to other people even before midnight, and most of us know what they are Like so many modern comedies, Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight, never quite throws off its kinship to a TV sitcom, albeit an x-rated one. Its theme of anything goes at certain unguarded moments (or, as Nancy puts it "saying those outrageous things is a way of being a bad person for one second without having to explain yourself" ) doesn't quite work. Yet Mr. Ackerman punctuates his script with enough laugh lines that do work to make for an entertaining hour and a half -- especially as abetted by Mr. Rando's crisp direction and the excellence of the cast and staging. A minor quibble on the last: Considering the Promenade's proximity to Zabar's and Fairway, one would think that the one nosh scene could have had a prop other than that New York comedy standard the Chinese takeout carton.
Fiorello! - Encores 20th Anniversary Season
https://vimeo.com/58543927In part two of this exclusive two-part video feature, A Christmas Story, The Musical's young star Johnny Rabe takes video camera in hand to explore backstage life of the hit Broadway show at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Stars Dan Lauria, Eddie Korbich, John Bolton and Erin Dilly welcome Rabe into their dressing rooms for fellowship, a (pretend) stiff drink and a rare peek from a balcony that overlooks one of Broadway's busiest streets. The long day of Broadway magic comes to a close as the cast and crew embrace the start of Hanukkah in a celebration led by the mother of one cast member. To see part one, click here.
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