An Event to Save Local Theatre with Alan Arkin & Robert Klein

An Event to Save Local Theatre with Alan Arkin & Robert Klein

The past year and a half of near devastation the pandemic has wrought local institutions also provided remarkable tales of perseverance, resourcefulness and reunion. Croton Fall’s Schoolhouse Theater’s past year touches on all these themes. It’s a story that reaches its climax in this week’s Benefit (virtual) Play Reading (with tickets still available) as Robert Klein and Alan Arkin come together for the first time for a reading 0f two Alan Arkin short comedies, The Amazing Randi and Virtual Reality.

As the Schoolhouse Theater’s Artistic Director Bram Lewis points out in his note below, what makes this first-time meeting between Alan and Robert a reunion of sorts is that their careers are so almost perfectly connected it seems impossible that they have never shared stage or screen before.

Dear What To Do,

We are 12 days away from Alan & Robert’s splendid, one of a kind virtual benefit… for our Schoolhouse…Saturday October 9th…

They’ve known each other warmly as famed, & early alumni of the eponymous Second City in Chicago…(way before Belushi, Ackroyd, Radner)

Alan, in those first protean days in the late 50’s, put Second City on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus along with Elaine May, Mike Nichols, David Gordon & others…

When Broadway and Hollywood hijacked Alan, Second City hired a skinny, handsome young man from the Bronx with wicked comic timing to take over Alan’s roles…

Robert Klein.

“Bram-I think I was his doppelgänger-is that the word?”

When either are speaking, defibrillators and definitely oxygen may be indispensable….

(Believe it or not) it’s the first time in allll these years that these two astonishing household God’s have gotten to work together…