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“Of all the countless Off-Broadway troupes, none has a more distinctive mission – or a higher artistic batting average – than the Mint Theater Company: I’ve never seen a production there that was a sliver less than superb.” Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

It’s “Wakes Week” in Hindle; the mill is closed and the workers are idle. Fanny Hawthorn is relaxing at the seashore with a girlfriend when she runs into Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner’s son. Alan takes Fanny to an hotel in Wales for a few days of fun, but the fun stops when their parents find out.

When Hindle Wakes premiered in London in 1912, many critics called it the best play of the year. However, the play’s unsentimental depiction of two young people seeking pleasure without commitment sparked moral outrage, filling England’s newspapers with passionate argument over the play’s controversial subject matter. Of course, controversy was good for business and Hindle Wakes was a hit.

Not seen in the U.S. in nearly a century, Mint Theater Company’s revival of Hindle Wakes “reaffirm[ed] the play as both well worth knowing in itself and particularly resonant in today’s political climate,” (Village Voice).1  The Wall Street Journal called Hindle Wakes “a study of provincial hypocrisy in Vicwardian England that crackles with a biting candor,” praising Gus Kaikkonen, “one of the deftest directors on the East Coast,” for his direction’s “crisp understatement… letting Houghton make his own stiletto-sharp points instead of ramming them home.”2 Remarking further on Houghton’s skillful storytelling, The New York Times noted that Hindle Wakes “proceeds… gentle as a summer rain until, bam … something electric happens to charge the air.”3

Cast

Jeremy Beck
Rebecca Noelle Brinkley
Emma Geer
Jonathan Hogan
Sara Carolynn Kennedy
Ken Marks
Brian Reddy
Sandra Shipley
Jill Tanner

Creatives

Sets: Charles Morgan
Costumes: Sam Fleming
Lights: Christian DeAngelis
Sound & Original Music: Jane Shaw
Props: Joshua Yocom
Hair & Wigs: Gerard Kelly
Dialects & Dramaturgy: Amy Stoller
Casting: Stephanie Klapper, CSA
Production Stage Manager: Jeff Meyers
Assistant Stage Manager: Elizabeth Ann Goodman/Marjorie Ann Wood
Illustration: Stefano Imbert
Graphics: hey jude design, inc.
Advertising: The Pekoe Group
Press: David Gersten & Associates

An industrious playwright from Manchester, Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) “startled England with the brilliant originality of his comedies of Lancashire life” (The New York Times). Blending truthfully observed realism with shrewd comic grit and “supremely sophisticated dexterities” (The Manchester Guardian), Houghton wrote over a dozen plays, many of which called for women’s sexual and economic freedom.

Born on February 22, 1881 in the town of Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire, William Stanley Houghton moved as a child to bustling Manchester, where his father thrived as a cotton merchant. After graduating from Manchester Grammar School, Houghton entered his father’s business as a commercial clerk, but devoted most of his spare hours to the theater. As an amateur actor, Houghton appeared in dozens of roles with the Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society, while writing one-act plays. In 1905, he was hired to write stage reviews for The Manchester City News, and soon after became assistant drama critic for The Manchester Guardian.

Under the aegis of theater manager Annie Horniman, Houghton decisively picked up his playwright’s pen. With the vibrant, socially engaged plays of the Gaiety Theatre, founded in 1908 as the first repertory company in Great Britain, the London-born “Miss Horniman invaded Manchester and captured it with her army of ideas” (The New York Sun). Houghton’s first one-act play at the Gaiety, the astringent domestic satire The Dear Departed (1908), revealed the playwright’s “capital sense of theatrical values” (The Guardian).

Over the next four years at the Gaiety, Houghton made consistent progress as a playwright. With his first full-length play, Independent Means (1908), Houghton introduced the free-thinking “woman of ideas” that animated his work. He also stimulated Manchester audiences with The Younger Generation (1910), which The Guardian called “a veracious and highly amusing piece of social satire” in which “the realism is delightful.” The Gaiety’s 1912 London premiere of Hindle Wakes at the Incorporated Stage Society, and then Coronet Theatre, launched Houghton as one of the preeminent young dramatists of his generation, while setting off a shockwave of controversy.

Tragically, only a year and a half after Hindle Wakes, Houghton died of meningitis on December 11, 1913, at the age of thirty-two. The New York Press’s Robert Allerton Parker memorialized the Manchester playwright: “the death of Stanley Houghton has taken away a real force in making the English drama cosmopolitan rather than insular, in widening its appeal while deepening its insight.” Over a century after Hindle Wakes’ much-discussed premiere—and following an acclaimed 2012 centennial production at London’s Finborough Theatre—Houghton’s rousing and “remarkable play” (The Observer) continues to resonate.