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Fashions For Men

“One might wonder how a story that takes place in a Hungarian haberdashery could possibly suit a 21st-century American audience, but the Mint’s production fits like a glove,”1 hailed TheaterMania of FASHIONS FOR MEN. A delightful comedy of character by Ferenc Molnár, FASHIONS tells the story of shop owner Peter Juhász, a saintly beacon of decency who only sees the good in everyone—making him easy prey for the sinners who surround him.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár rose to international acclaim with his cosmopolitan fairy tales for adults. Molnár’s plays inventively blended romantic fantasy and sardonic wit; pointed social satire and polished theatricality. Best known today for the mystical folk play Liliom (1922; the basis of the classic musical Carousel) Molnár was immensely prolific as a journalist, short story writer, novelist, and the author of forty-two plays, many of which were performed widely throughout Europe and America.

Katie Roche

Mint Theater continued its exhaustive exploration into the work of Teresa Deevy—which began with WIFE TO JAMES WHELAN in 2010 and TEMPORAL POWERS in 2011—with a production of Deevy’s compelling drama, Katie Roche. The play’s mercurial heroine is a servant girl whose romantic ambitions reach for the heavens. “Katie Roche is the third Deevy work to be produced by the Mint in as many years. It may be the best one yet,” 1 wrote David Barbour in Lighting and Sound America.

Teresa Deevy was born in 1894 as the youngest of thirteen children in Waterford, Ireland. Though she intended to teach, Teresa contracted Meniere’s disease while at University College Dublin and lost her hearing. She went to London to study lip-reading and the theater provided her an opportunity to practice—there she discovered her calling.

Mary Broome

“There must be no shortage of little-known, finely crafted, funny, thought-provoking plays exploring the fracturing of English society in the early twentieth century, because the Mint Theatre Company keeps coming up with them,”1 wrote the New Yorker of MARY BROOME. Monkhouse’s biting comedy tells the story of a household turned upside down by an upstairs/downstairs liaison between the ne’er do well son and the honest housemaid.

Allan Monkhouse (1858-1936) was a dramatist, novelist, and critic known for his piquant portrayal of middle class life in northern England. He startled audiences with complex characters, who pierced societal niceties as they grappled with the contradictions of a rapidly changing world.

Temporal Powers

After launching the Teresa Deevy Project with WIFE TO JAMES WHELAN in 2010, the Mint continued its exploration of “one of the most undeservedly neglected and significant playwrights of the 20th century” (The Irish Times) with a production of TEMPORAL POWERS.

Teresa Deevy was born in 1894, the youngest of thirteen children.  Intent on a teaching career, Teresa enrolled in the University College, Dublin in 1913.  After about a year she began to feel ill; her ears rang and she suffered frequent bouts of vertigo.  She was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease, an incurable condition caused by fluid imbalance in the inner ear.  Within a few years, Deevy had completely lost her hearing.

Wife To James Whelan

In 2010 Mint claimed the role of champion on behalf of the brilliant, but forgotten Irish playwright, Teresa Deevy. The ambitious Teresa Deevy Project, which includes three productions, as well as two published compilations of her plays, was launched with her “crisp psychological drama,”1 WIFE TO JAMES WHELAN.

Teresa Deevy (1894-1963)  After years of rejection, Deevy had her first play produced at Ireland’s Abbey Theater in 1930, at the age of 36.  One of Ireland’s leading critics predicted: “The new dramatist from whom most may be expected in the future is Miss T. Deevy.”[1]

So Help Me God!

In 2009, the Mint headed downtown to the Lucille Lortel Theater for a production of the wickedly witty backstage comedy, SO HELP ME GOD! by Maurine Dallas Watkins. The production starred two-time Emmy Award-winner Kristen Johnston as the temperamental star who tramples everyone who stands in her way.

Maurine Dallas Watkins (1896-1969) wrote the 1926 play CHICAGO, upon which the musical is based.  Winner of six Tonys and a Best Picture Oscar for 2002 film, the musical CHICAGO would seem a “sure thing” from the start. But its beginnings were very much in doubt. Had Watkins got her way, CHICAGO the musical would not exist at all.

Is Life Worth Living?

Lennox Robinson’s IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? (aka DRAMA AT INISH) is a gloriously goofy comedy that imagines the impact a steady diet of serious drama might have on the amiable residents of a seaside town in Ireland. In 2009 the play was delivered to New York audiences for the first time in 75 years.

Robinson began to write poetry in his teens, vaguely dreaming of a career as a poet or musician.  In 1907, when he was 20, he saw a touring production of the Abbey Theater.  The performance changed his life.  He was promptly inspired to write his first play, The Clancy Name, a realistic drama about a patrician Irish family willing to destroy itself so its good name can be preserved.  The play was produced at the Abbey in 1908 and caught the attention of W.B. Yeats, who promptly hired Robinson, despite his youth and lack of experience, as the theater manager.  Yeats felt that running a theater was the best education Robinson could have as a playwright.

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd

In 2003, New York audiences were introduced to D. H. Lawrence—the playwright—with a highly acclaimed production of THE DAUGHTER IN LAW. Five years later, Mint Theater returned to the same literary well with a production of Lawrence’s searing 1910 drama, THE WIDOWING OF MRS. HOLROYD

D.H. Lawrence 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 (1928), which was considered to be obscene and was widely banned; Chatterley was not officially legal in England until 1960.
Lawrence is the author of eight full-length plays, none of which he ever saw onstage in his lifetime (including The Daughter-In-Law, produced by The Mint in 2003). Though it seems that he never shook off the black mark of rabid literary censorship, his works remain to this day celebrated studies of human passion and desperation. At the time of his death, much of the public regarded him as a pornographer rather than a literary genius; yet in Lawrence’s obituary notice, E.M. Forster cited him as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”

The Fifth Column

Ernest Hemingway wrote THE FIFTH COLUMN in 1937 while he was in Madrid working as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. A hot-blooded romance played out against a backdrop of treachery and intrigue during the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway’s first and only play was published a year later.

THE FIFTH COLUMN rings out with a battle-scarred truth as one would expect from Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel and Pulitzer-prize winning author of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls and a celebrated war correspondent.

The Return of The Prodigal

Five years after first introducing New York audiences to the extraordinary British playwright, St. John Hankin, Mint Theater revisited “the forgotten man of Edwardian drama” (Guardian) with THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL, “a coolly enthralling play about a timeless subject: failure.”1

St John Hankin began to contribute humorous essays and dramatic parodies including new “last-acts” for well-known plays to Punch magazine 1898.  In 1901 some of his contributions were anthologized as Mr. Punch’s Dramatic Sequels.  Hankin also contributed about seventy drama reviews to The London Times before beginning his career as a playwright in 1903 with THE TWO MR. WETHERBY’S.  Hankin was actively involved in running the Stage Society, a London theater group that supported plays of literary merit, founded in part, to avoid the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship.

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