I'm thrilled to announce that one of my favorite New York spots, the famed, century-old Players Club, is hosting the premiere party for our very first, wholly original radio play (that is to say, one not adapted from classic material), Room to Swing an Axe (by yours truly, natch)!

"Dawson is a master mixologist and he serves up a captivating cocktail of humor and pathos, to be sipped and savored, not shot. One part cocktail party, one part drunk tank, one part DT ward. " Tom Lynch, Theatre World

Free to members! Only $10 to guests! Tickets available at the door.

If you've never been to The Players, now's your chance! At 7:00 PM on Weds. May 7, the prestigious, private theater club opens it doors to the PUBLIC i.e. you!

So what's it all about, you ask?

Axe, is, at its heart, at its “eye,” so to speak, a tale of male friendship. What Australians call mateship. The idea being, women come and go, but mateship is steadfast. Boswell and Johnson, Holmes and Watson, Errol Flynn and David Niven holed up in a shorehouse they amusingly dubbed “Cirohsis by the Sea.” The Rat Pack.

Part Big Apple bar-guide and boozy bon mot, part melancholy memoir and halucinatory head trip, Axe tells the tale of two fifty-something pub pals, self-styled Hellraisers in the tradition of Burton and O’Toole, focusing on their flawed friendship, in particular, a shared month of holiday drinking. As the men rummily recount their addled adventures, such as they are, embroidering their often opposing accounts with a systematic gilding and blackening of detail, one cold common fact is revealed, haunting one, destroying the other.

Featuring Carlyle Owens as a whiskey-wobbled would be writer obsessed with a childhood injury, Laurence Mintz as the Sears salesmen and besotted sot who’s obsessed with him, and Michael Jarmus as the voice of Raconteur Radio and assorted other characters.

With theatrical lighting, vintage commercials, and hundreds of sound effects! Plus live period covers by our resident honey-toned chanteuse, Danielle Illario, and tusk-tickling piano man, Arlan Feiles.

We've kept the price low (ONLY $10!) because I want YOU to come! To see the show, yes, but also to see the Club and sample some of the most carefully prepared cocktails I've ever had the pleasure to upend.

Want to see Mark Twain's poker table, Charlie Chan's pool cue, Edwin Booth's Hamlet skull? How about the expansive portrait gallery of past and present members (including Humphrey Bogart, Peter O'Toole, Lauren Bacall, James Cagney, Frank Baum, Eugene O'Neill, and Christopher Plummer, among many others)?

Well then, come on, folks! Knock back one of the Club's famous Old Fashioneds (or a Sidecar or a Presbyterian), while watching Raconteur Radio perform on the same stage once trod by Frank Sinatra and still used by Club member Tony Bennett! Don't miss this!

The show, though essentially rewritten from word one, is rooted in one of my plays from the bygone days of BonBock, the NYC theater company I ran in the nineties. Click HERE to see what the critics said then.