David Heron (left) and Douglas Prout in the world première of Love and Marriage and New York City in 1999. (Phillip Lynch)
April 13, 2025
David Heron revives ‘green card’ play Love and Marriage and NYC
Off-Broadway comedy channels immigration debate, celebrates 25th anniversary
Would you marry for a green card? This is the intriguing question at the heart of Jamaican-born playwright David Heron’s romantic comedy drama Love and Marriage and New York City, which returns to the New York stage this June in celebration of its 25th anniversary.
Broadway World Award-winner Heron will produce and direct the one-night-only silver anniversary performance to be presented as a staged reading production at Jamaica Performing Arts Center on Sunday, June 22, at 7:00 pm.
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It will be an exclusive cultural event in celebration of New York City’s annual Caribbean American Heritage Month festivities, held across the city each June.
A complimentary Caribbean cuisine reception will precede the performance.
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Explaining his decision to revive the production, Heron said: “Over 25 years after its world première in Jamaica, Love and Marriage and New York City remains as topical as ever, dealing as it does with the immensely critical and complicated subject of immigration. In a realistic and humane way, it highlights the allure of the American dream to immigrants everywhere, and the extent to which people will go to achieve it — with romantic, dramatic and comedic consequences… [S]electing Love and Marriage and New York City… was a natural move to make, especially with everything happening in our current environment regarding immigration. The play has never been more relevant, it seems, than now.”
Set in Manhattan in the late 1990s, Love and Marriage and New York City tells the story of two Jamaican-born couples who marry strictly for green card purposes, only to discover that once Cupid’s arrow flies, no marriage is ever purely about business.
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Heron believes that the experience of the play in 2025 will evoke feelings of great nostalgia as well as concern about the nation’s current and evolving immigration policies.
The playwright shared that: “The American première took place just over a year before 9/11. America was so much more innocent then. The Twin Towers still stood… There was no ICE or Department Of Homeland Security. There was the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). So much was so different from now.”
Love and Marriage and New York City is Heron’s biggest international success to date. Directed in 1999 by the now-late Norman Rae, it featured actors Karen Harriott, Douglas Prout, Bertina Macaulay, and Heron himself as the four star-crossed green card lovers. The production marked its American première with a South Florida regional tour in 2000 before heading to Europe, where it toured throughout the UK in both 2002 and 2003, eventually playing at the world-famous Peggy Ashcroft Theatre in London.
It was produced at the Paul Robeson Theatre in New York before arriving Off Broadway at Brooklyn’s Billie Holiday Theatre in 2005, directed by legendary theatre icon Woody King Jr. Kingston 6 Productions of Toronto then produced the Canadian première at The Harbourfront Centre, downtown Toronto, in 2008.
Among other accolades, Love and Marriage and New York City earned eight International Theatre Institute (Jamaica) Actor Boy Award nominations, as well as three AUDELCO Award nominations for Excellence in Off Broadway Black Theatre in New York. It also earned Heron the City Council of New York’s Proclamation and Award for Excellence in 2006.
According to Heron, as with last year’s première of McBee, an accomplished cast of actors spanning the worlds of stage, film, and television is being assembled for the show.
Tickets for the silver anniversary performance go on sale on Sunday, April 20.
Special guest Sheryl Lee Ralph (second left) joins the cast of Love and Marriage and New York City backstage following a performance. With her (from left) are Karen Harriott, David Heron, former Jampro Film Commissioner Del Crooks, Rodney Campbell (partially hidden), and Bertina Macaulay. (Phillip Lynch)
