Mint Theater first introduced New York theatergoers to the neglected talents of Arthur Schnitzler with an acclaimed and long-running production of FAR AND WIDE in 2003. Three years later with THE LONELY WAY, Mint continued “doing its utmost to restore Schnitzler to where he rightfully belongs, alongside such dramatists of middle-class life as Chekhov and Ibsen.”1
In 1931, THE LONELY WAY (Der einsame Weg) was bound for Broadway, but its New York premiere was cancelled after troubled out-of-town tryouts. Schnitzler’s play remained unproduced in New York until 2005 when the Mint presented the world premiere of a new translation by Margret Schaefer and artistic director Jonathan Bank.
The play—about a world-weary artist who longs to connect with his son before it’s too late—moved audiences and critics alike. “This spare, lucid production is a revelation,” wrote Miriam Horn in The New York Times, calling the play, “an intensely moral work that finds breath-stopping drama where most of us find it in our own lives: in conversation with those we’re vulnerable with — a parent, a lover, a child.”1
Arthur Schnitzler (Playwright, 1862-1931) was one of the most famous of all of the great personalities in Vienna at the turn of the last century. A prolific author, Schnitzler wrote more than twenty prose works including stories, novellas and novels in addition to over twenty-five plays. From before 1900 until 1925, Schnitzler was more talked about, and his plays were more performed on the stages of Germany and Austria than any other writer. Schnitzler was both a Jew and a critic of the Austrian Monarchy, contributing to the censorship of his work in his lifetime, and by the Nazi’s after his death. His work ultimately suffered the same fate as the Viennese culture that he was describing and vanished into obscurity after Word War I. His best-known play today is Reigen a.k.a. La Ronde. This work was the basis for The Blue Room by David Hare, as well as the recently released film Love in the Time of Money. Audiences may also be familiar with Anatol, an early work (1893) consisting of seven scenes variously controversial, censored or banned for immorality. Neither of these plays accurately represents the breadth or depth of Schnitzler’s genius; what Benedict Nightingale describes as his “inquisitive, complex, formidably moral intelligence.”
MARK ANDERSON: ARTHUR SCHNITZLER AND FIN DE SIECLE VIENNA
Mark Anderson, Prof. of Germanic Languages (Columbia Univ.) discusses turn-of-the-century Vienna and one of the leading figures of its literary avant-garde—Arthur Schnitzler. Anderson is the author of the upcoming Uncanny Nation: The Jewish-German Origins of Modernity from Paris to Bayreuth. He holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, and L’Université de Paris.
MARGRET SCHAEFER: TRANSLATING SCHNITZLER
Audiences are invited to meet Margret Schaefer, the translator of Mint’s newly commissioned version of Der Einsame Weg. Schaefer has also published three volumes of Schnitzler’s short fiction—Night Games (2002), Desire and Delusion (2003) and Bachelors (2006). She received her Ph. D. from U.C. Berkeley and has taught Comparative Literature at Berkeley, San Francisco State and the Univ. of Illinois, Chicago.
MARTIN HARRIES: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE IN VIENNA
Martin Harries, Assoc. Prof. of English (NYU) speaks on the intersection of two powerful forces shaping turn-of-the-century thought. He has been published in New German Critique, Theatre Journal and The Yale Journal of Criticism and is the author of Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship. Harries was educated at Yale, Columbia and Cambridge Universities and has also taught at Yale, Williams College and Princeton.
ASSOCIATION OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPISTS: PARENTS, CHILDREN AND IDENTITY
The Lonely Way raises compelling questions about identity. A child discovers his parents are not who he thought they were. A parent seeks a relationship with the child they gave up for adoption. Two experts from the Association of Marriage and Family Therapists discuss the psychological and social questions raised by The Lonely Way.
