Sharon Gless in "Cahoots"

Victory Gardens Theater's 26th anniversary season finale will bring Sharon Gless, best known as crime fighter Christine Cagney on TV's Cagney & Lacey, to Chicago this spring to star in the world premiere of Claudia Allen's newest play, Cahoots, May 12 through June 18. Cahoots,

Allen's follow-up to last season's Victory Gardens smash hit Winter starring Julie Harris, is a madcap show business comedy about a playwriting team, Madeline Ballantine and Ray O'Keefe, who chase fame, fortune and each other across several decades of the twentieth century. The cast includes Deanna Dunagan, Sean Grennan, Brad Harbaugh, Brighid O'Shaughnessy, Rob Riley, Jordan Teplitz and Meg Thalken. Victory Gardens Associate Artistic Director Sandy Shinner will direct. Previews begin May 12. Press opening is May 22. Cahoots runs through June 18.

From her starring role in Faraday & Company in 1973 to her most recent TV series The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, Sharon Gless has brought her own brand of humor, intelligence and dramatic flair to each of her roles. She is best known as Cagney from the hit series Cagney & Lacey, a role which won her two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and six Emmy nominations. Her most recent stage credits include starring with Tom Conti in Neil Simon's Chapter 2 at the Gielgud Theater, with Bill Paterson in Stephen King's Misery at the Criterion Theater, and opposite Kim Hunter in Lillian Helman's Watch on the Rhine at the StageWest Theater in Massachussetts, and later, two productions in London's West End.

Chicago Magazine named Claudia Allen the Best Playwright in Chicago in 1999. A member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble, Allen won two Jeff Awards for Victory Gardens' premieres of her plays The Long Awaited and Still Waters, and received a Jeff nomination for Best New Work for Winter last season. All three productions were directed by Sandy Shinner. Allen's association with Sharon Gless began when Gless and Tyne Daly, Gless' "Cagney & Lacey" co-star, appeared in a 1994 Chicago Theatres on the Air presentation of Deed of Trust. Allen's other credits include Hannah Free, The Gays of Our Lives, and the current critically-acclaimed, long-running late night hit Xena Live!