Stephen Adly Guirgis's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Between Riverside and Crazy receives its Broadway premiere at the Hayes Theater in fall 2022. Get Between Riverside and Crazy tickets on New York Theatre Guide now.
Between Riverside and Crazy is a play that centers on an Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive, where Walter "Pops" Washington lives with his recently paroled son, Junior. Nobody wants them anymore, least of all their landlord, who is trying everything to get them to move out. Pops refuses to budge — firstly, because the apartment is to die for, and secondly, because he's made it into a second home for down-on-their-luck addicts, orphans, and others that Pops has come to care deeply for, so much that they've become like a second family. Among the frequent visitors are the recovering addict Oswald and his girlfriend Lulu, who also see Pops like a father.
While he's fighting to keep his apartment, Pops also has another battle to contend with: a discrimination lawsuit against the police unit that once employed him. Pops, who is Black, was shot by another police officer, and for years he's carried resentment about how they handled his disability compensation and the incident at large. Between Riverside and Crazy shows Pops's path to redemption from the injustices he's wrought with his own bitterness, and the path to redemption for his chosen family as well.
The first production of Between Riverside and Crazy off Broadway took place in 2014 at Atlantic Theater Company, and a year later, the production was remounted at Second Stage Theater's Off-Broadway stage. A 2015 review of that production of Between Riverside and Crazy for New York Theatre Guide reads, "Guirgis is writing about lives that don’t “fit” the smooth path that we like to see onstage – the ones who make us think we should be like them. And he raises blunt issues about race that we don’t see enough of in our art. Hats off to that."
Following rave reviews, the show won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, and the Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Play, all in 2015.
Is Between Riverside and Crazy on Broadway?
Between Riverside and Crazy is on Broadway through February 12, 2023. The show has been performed in various cities across America, but not again in New York since the 2015 Off-Broadway production. There are some parallels to the original, though: The original director, Austin Pendleton, returns to helm the 2022 show, and Second Stage is also putting up this revival, this time in its Broadway house.
How long is Between Riverside and Crazy 2022?
Between Riverside and Crazy runs 2 hours and 20 minutes with an intermission.
Tickets to Between Riverside and Crazy are available now.
