Ex-anchor of the PBS NewsHour, Jim Lehrer, has a play premiering Sept. 12: “Bell,” a one-man show “exploring the curious mind of Alexander Graham Bell.”
The show will run eight performances at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., 7:30 nightly plus a matinee at 2 p.m. Saturday. Bell, the inventor of the telephone and advocate for persons who are deaf, was also the society’s second president, and his family remained active in its management for decades.
Rick Foucheux, a member of D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre company, will appear as Bell. Jeremy Skidmore, artistic director of Washington’s Theater Alliance, is director.
Lehrer has written 20 novels, three other books and three plays. Next from him: a novel about President Kennedy’s assassination, Top Down, to be published by Random House Oct. 8. The plot concentrates on a Secret Service agent who was not able to save the president’s life, and a newspaper reporter who covered the killing — a fictional version of Lehrer, who was then a journalist in Dallas/Fort Worth.