By Coral Gables Gazette staff

What happens when a lie becomes more real than the life it replaced? That’s the question at the center of Harry Clarke, David Cale’s wicked, shape-shifting solo play opening Friday, October 10 at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel. The production stars Mark H. Dold, a chameleon performer familiar to local audiences for his work in Appropriate and The Lehman Trilogy and runs through November 2.

On its surface, the play follows Philip Brugglestein, a shy Midwesterner with a voice too soft and a past too small, who remakes himself into “Harry Clarke,” a brash, confident Brit who charms his way into the lives—and beds—of a wealthy Manhattan family. But beneath its comic bite and sexual charge, Harry Clarke asks bigger questions about self-invention, performance, and what it costs to truly disappear inside a persona.

Written by Obie Award winner David Cale and first performed in New York in 2017, the play’s regional premiere at GableStage offers a rare opportunity to see a solo psychological thriller driven entirely by voice, gesture and illusion. The production runs 80 minutes with no intermission and contains mature themes and language.

One man, ten personas

In Harry Clarke, the stage belongs entirely to Dold, who cycles through a full cast of characters—men, women, family members, lovers, bystanders—all filtered through the unreliable narrative of a man who has stopped being one. The result is part confessional, part fever dream, part sleight of hand.

The Boston Globe, reviewing a previous production, wrote: “Dold casts an utterly engrossing spell.” It’s not hyperbole. The actor slips so fluidly between dialects, postures, and personalities that it can take a beat to realize he’s become someone new. Yet the transformation is never gimmicky; the illusions are sustained by empathy and precision, not theatrics.

This will be Dold’s third major appearance on the GableStage stage. His turn in The Lehman Trilogy earned him a 2024 Carbonell nomination for Best Actor, and the production itself won Best Play. His résumé includes the original Broadway cast of The Inheritance (2020 Tony Award, Best Play), major Off-Broadway roles, and television and film work. But solo performance holds a special place in his career: in June 2020, he became the first professional actor in America to return to live performance after pandemic shutdowns, starring in Harry Clarke at Barrington Stage Company.

This production, in many ways, brings that history full circle.

GableStage as mirror and labyrinth

That Harry Clarke lands at GableStage, one of South Florida’s most intimate and risk-taking theaters, is no accident. Known for pairing ambitious scripts with rigorously staged productions, GableStage has long been a home for psychological depth and moral ambiguity.

Here, under the direction of Julianne Boyd—founding Artistic Director of Barrington Stage Company—Cale’s text becomes both a puzzle and an act of seduction. Boyd, who directed Harry Clarke during its historic 2020 reopening, brings not only a deep familiarity with the play but a national reputation for balancing comedy with conscience.

Her résumé includes Broadway (Eubie!), Off-Broadway hits (A… My Name is Alice), and a long career developing new work by writers like Mark St. Germain and Christopher Demos-Brown. She also helmed the world premiere of American Son, which later transferred to Broadway and Netflix. But with Harry Clarke, the canvas is deliberately smaller—just one actor, one chair, and a hundred choices.

Boyd’s staging respects the text’s momentum. There’s no scenery to hide behind, no music to lean on, no break in the unraveling. The effect is both exhilarating and claustrophobic—an audience watching a man become a myth and then a ghost, all in real time.

Character study for the Age of Reinvention

Beneath the play’s erotic energy and comic reversals lies something more unsettling. Harry Clarke isn’t just about a man lying his way into a new life—it’s about a culture where masks are rewarded, authenticity is elusive, and seduction becomes currency.

Cale, whose past work includes monologue-driven pieces like Lillian and A Likely Story, has a knack for giving lonely characters the tools to articulate themselves—only to reveal that language is part of the illusion. Philip’s transformation into Harry is seamless but unstable. His charm is magnetic, but self-serving. He claims to have found freedom, but Cale leaves us asking: freedom from what, and at what cost?

For audiences accustomed to traditional structure, the play’s slipperiness may come as a surprise. There is no resolution in Harry Clarke, only exposure—of character, artifice, and perhaps, of ourselves.

If you go…

What: Harry Clarke by David Cale
Who: Starring Mark H. Dold; Directed by Julianne Boyd
Where: GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables (inside the Biltmore Hotel)
When: Opens Friday, October 10 at 8 p.m.; runs through November 2
Runtime: 80 minutes, no intermission
Advisory: Contains mature language and sexual themes
Presented by: GableStage in arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc.