OUTCASTS by John Patrick Shanley

A One Night Only Benefit Reading for The Lee Strasberg Creative Center

On November 18, 2025, Alec Baldwin & John Patrick Shanley presented OUTCASTS — five new one-act plays by Pulitzer and Academy Award-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley. “Each of these new pieces gives voice to the overloooked, the unheard, the exiled among us—the true outcasts,” Shanley shares.

The one-night-only benefit reading featured a star-studded cast, including Alec Baldwin, Erick Betancourt, Rebecca De Mornay, Susie Essman, Jeff Garlin, Jamie Hector, Alessandra Mesa, Debra Messing, Sidney Williams, and MC Ivan Hernandez. Baldwin, De Mornay, Hector, and Mesa are all alumni of The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute.

“My acting career literally began at the Strasberg Institute on 15th Street with Geoffrey Horne and Marcia Haufrecht,” Baldwin shares. “I will always be grateful that I began my career here. Strasberg gave me a technique built upon a foundation of truth. Among the great playwrights working today, John Patrick Shanley’s writing, with both the humor and the drama marbled together, demands a focus and agility that I acquired largely through Strasberg. I have long admired Shanley’s remarkable work and I am grateful for the opportunity to celebrate that work while benefiting my theatrical alma mater.”

The performance was met with rave reviews, including praise for LSTFI alumna Alessandra Mesa who “delivered a tour de force reading” alongside Baldwin in The Upside Down Man.

Photography by Hunter Canning