Newhouse Theater

Running Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes, including one intermission

"A bona fide masterpiece!"

The Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2019

NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE is a new work in the classic John Guare style: urbane, funny, literate and off-beat -- with its finger right on the pulse. And a racing pulse at that! For those not up on their 19th century whaling slang, a “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” is literally a wild ride: a harpooned whale would sometimes drag a ship full of whalers on a crazy desperate course, often for miles, as it thrashed and flailed trying to escape its captors.

Guare takes us on just such a voyage with Mundie (John Larroquette), a playwright turned New York stockbroker, who ventures from Manhattan to Nantucket island one day on a surreal errand. He gets mixed up with a giant lobster, Roman Polanski, a pornography ring, Walt Disney, stranded children, a murder, and Jorge Luis Borges to name a few. The action takes place in both the present day, and in a memory-filled excursion to the 1970s, because, in Guare’s universe, the standard rules of time and space delightfully don’t apply.

NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE reunites John Guare and director Jerry Zaks — the team that brought us two of the most enduring and beloved plays from LCT’s early years: The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.

Watch the cast and director of NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE
pay tribute to author John Guare


Watch this montage of scenes from the show!

Nantucket Sleigh Ride On the LCT Blog