Free Streaming: Becomes A Woman

Free Streaming of Mint Theater Company's World Premiere production of BECOMES A WOMAN, by Betty Smith. Recorded live in 2023.

Partnership

PARTNERSHIP is a refreshing take on the importance of work-life balance and a celebration of the eye-opening power of love. 

Elizabeth Baker

Becomes A Woman

Betty Smith burst onto the literary scene in 1943 with her debut novel, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. The New York Times called it “the best first novel I have seen in many a moon…here is a book worth getting excited about and an author worth cheering.”

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn endures through generations as one of the biggest bestsellers of the twentieth century. Yet, while Smith found her greatest fame as a novelist, she was most passionate about her work as the playwright of over 70 one-act and full-length dramas, commenting in 1937: “I write plays because I’d rather do that than anything else in the world.” Smith’s plays share with her novels a focus upon working-class women persevering through poverty to craft their own narratives of self-determination, often fueled by their engagement with reading and books.

The Daughter-in-Law (2022)

THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW is D.H. Lawrence’s portrayal of a marriage in crisis. The play was written in 1913, when Lawrence was still a schoolteacher in Croydon but went unproduced until 1967. Mint first produced Lawrence’s play in 2003 and it remains one of our most popular and successful productions. The New York Times declared when naming it among the Best Productions of the Year. 

David Herbert Lawrence (Playwright 1885-1930) was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. He is best known as the author of Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and the notorious Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was considered to be obscene and widely banned; remarkably, the novel was not legally available in England until 1960. Many of Lawrence’s works, including The Daughter-in-Law, are set in the Eastwood of his childhood, where he grew up the third son of a coal miner.

The New Morality

Mint Theater Company Free Streaming.

The Fatal Weakness

THE FATAL WEAKNESS, George Kelly’s last produced play, tells the story of Ollie Espenshade—an incurable romantic who discovers, after 28 years of marriage, that her husband is a lying cheat.  It opened in New York on November 19, 1946 in a production starring Ina Claire.  Although Claire’s triumphant return to Broadway after a five year absence garnered much of the press attention, Kelly’s play turned more than a few critics’ heads.

Admired for his character-driven satires and gimlet-eyed plays of modern manners, George Kelly (1887-1974) led a distinguished career in the New York theatre from the 1910s through the 1940s.

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