Production history

Lobby Hero was first performed at the Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons is a not-for-profit Off-Broadway theater located in New York City dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists, and to the production of their new work....

, on March 13, 2001. The cast was as follows:

• Jeff - Glenn Fitzgerald
  Glenn Fitzgerald
  Glenn Fitzgerald is an American actor who has had over 30 roles in movies or television series. He played the character of Sean in The Sixth Sense...
  
  
• William - Dion Graham
• Dawn - Heather Burns
  Heather Burns
  - Life and career :Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Chicago Bull and U.S. Attorney Jim Burns. She is engaged to fellow actor Ajay Naidu, her high school boyfriend. Heather attended and graduated from Evanston Township High School. She is a graduate of New York University's...
  
  
• Bill - Tate Donovan
  Tate Donovan
  Tate Buckley Donovan is an American actor. He is known for his role in the FX drama Damages, as Tom Shayes, and for his role as Jimmy Cooper in the American teen drama television series The O.C....
  
  

• Directed by Mark Brokaw
  Mark Brokaw
  Mark Brokaw is a stage director. He won the Drama Desk Award, Obie Award and Lucille Lortel Award as Outstanding Director of a Play for How I Learned to Drive.Brokaw was raised in Aledo, Illinois and graduated from the Yale Drama School...
  
  

The UK Première was staged at the Donmar Warehouse

Donmar Warehouse

Donmar Warehouse is a small not-for-profit theatre in the Covent Garden area of London, with a capacity of 251.-About:Under the artistic leadership of Michael Grandage, the theatre has presented some of London’s most memorable award-winning theatrical experiences, as well as garnered critical...

 between April 4 (opening April 10) and May 4, 2002. The cast was as follows:

• William - Gary McDonald
  Gary McDonald (actor)
  Gary McDonald is an English actor of Jamaican descent. A student at Elliott school in Putney, McDonald played football for Wimbledon FC under Dario Gradi....
  
  
• Dawn - Charlotte Randle
• Bill - Dominic Rowan
  Dominic Rowan
  Dominic Rowan is an English actor.-Theatre:Rowan's work in theatre includes: A Dream Play, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Mourning Becomes Electra, Three Sisters, The Talking Cure and Private Lives at the National Theatre, London; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice and Talk of the City for...
  
  
• Jeff - David Tennant
  David Tennant
  David Tennant is a Scottish actor. In addition to his work in theatre, including a widely praised Hamlet, Tennant is best known for his role as the tenth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who, along with the title role in the 2005 TV serial Casanova and as Barty Crouch, Jr...
  
  

• Directed by Mark Brokaw
  Mark Brokaw
  Mark Brokaw is a stage director. He won the Drama Desk Award, Obie Award and Lucille Lortel Award as Outstanding Director of a Play for How I Learned to Drive.Brokaw was raised in Aledo, Illinois and graduated from the Yale Drama School...
  
  

This production transferred to the New Ambassadors Theatre

New Ambassadors Theatre

The Ambassadors Theatre , is a West End theatre located in West Street, near Cambridge Circus on the Charing Cross Road in the City of Westminster...

 from June 26 (opening July 1) to August 10, 2002.

Plot summary

The show follows a doorman in his late twenties, his strict supervisor, and an overbearing cop and his rookie female partner. The show is set in a foyer of a middle-income Manhattan apartment building in the middle of the night.

Reviews

Toby Young

Toby Young

Toby Young, MA, FRSA is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his stint in New York as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine...

 said in a review in The Spectator

The Spectator

The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...

, "Lobby Hero is a fantastic play but I'd be hard pushed to say why. You can tell it's good because, within about five minutes, any sense you have of being a member of the audience, sitting down and watching a group of actors perform on stage, has vanished.... In what amounts to an out-of-body experience, you're totally absorbed in what's going on...Lonergan is particularly good, both here and in This Is Our Youth, at showing how good intentions can be undermined by unconscious desires. Few of his characters are capable of resisting their own malignant impulses."