Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph is adding a surprise to its fall season.

Funny Feeling, a new drama by New York playwright Judith Keller about the moral ambiguities of art, sex, and the law, will be produced as a staged reading in Chandler Music Hall, Saturday, Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m.

Veteran director, writer, and producer Joe Cacaci, executive producer of the CBS prime-time series, “The Education of Max Bickford,” is currently rehearsing four noted actors in New York for next month’s Chandler show.

Top Actress

Elizabeth Franz, Funny Feeling’s leading lady, won the country’s highest theatre honor, the Antoinette Perry Award (the “Tony”) for her role as Linda Loman in the 1999 New York production of Death of a Salesman, plus multiple awards for her performance of the role on tour. Franz has also been nominated two other times for a Tony, for the Broadway hit Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1983 and for Mornings at Seven in 2002, for which she also received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations.

In 2004 and 2005, she appeared at the Royal National Theatre in London in the Sam Shepard play, Buried Child. The actress has starred in numerous films and Off-Broadway and regional theater productions. In 2003 she received the Dramatist Guild Fund’s Lifetime Achievement in the Theater award. As a character actor on television, she is known for her roles in Roseanne, Another World, Law & Order, Cold Case, and Judging Amy.

Franz plays Lucille Harrison, whose life spirals quickly downward when photographs she has innocently shot of her young granddaughter dancing around naked after a bath are turned over to the local police by the photo processor who suspects child pornography.

It isn’t long before events and reactions force Lucille into intensely charged relationships with her family, her lover, her co-workers, and her community.

Without polemics and with some humor, this provocative play opens the door to discussion of critical issues such as personal liberty, privacy, freedom of expression, and censorship.

Stellar Cast

Appearing with Franz in the Chandler performance will be Ray Abruzzo, Ilfa Edelstein, and James DeMarse.

Abruzzo is known to many as Little Carmine Lupertazzi for four seasons on HBO’s The Sopranos.

He is highly regarded for his many contributions to Los Angeles theater as an actor and director, and for his extensive television repertoire: as a regular in NYPD Blue and Law and Order, and in guest appearances for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, L.A. Law, Dynasty, The Practice and Boston Legal.

Edelstein’s stage career includes starring roles in numerous plays. She was a regular in the television series The Hoop Life and The Education of Max Bickford, and has appeared in Law & Order and other shows.

DeMarse recently played Bob in the Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate on Broadway, and was the lead in Foote’s Orphan Cycle, which ran in New York for a year.

DeMarse includes in his TV and film credits Side by Each, Soldier’s Heart, The Sopranos, Law & Order, and Ferris Bueller.

Director Cacaci has written and produced numerous movies for television. He produced the PBS series Copshop, and has directed dozens of regional and commercial theater productions, including his own plays, as well as numerous world premieres.

Cacaci is a founder of the Berkshire Playwrights Lab, which presents new plays through readings, workshops, and fully-staged productions.

"I admire the daring spirit with which Judith Keller has written this compelling, sensitively crafted script," Cacaci said of Funny Feeling.

He cited Keller’s "unflinching willingness to plumb the depths” of a theme, and “to develop and take it to the next level.”

Cacaci has presented the play in a private reading but this will be its first appearance in a public theater.

"The play deals with a timely and provocative subject, one that is rarely explored in the theatre. I'm very happy that the Chandler audience will be the first to help launch it."

Supporting roles in Chandler’s Funny Feeling production will be taken by seasoned Vermont performers. Cacaci will rehearse the stars in Manhattan and will come to Randolph to prepare the local cast early next month.

Call the Chandler box office for reservations at 728-6464 or at www.chandler-arts.org.