MTC-Far and wide
1/6/03
5:05 PM
Page 1
with
Jonathan Bank, Artistic Director Presents
Kelly AuCoin Lisa Bostnar Rob Breckenridge Lee Bryant Anne-Marie Cusson Antony Hagopian Ken Kliban James Knight Victoria Mack
Vicki R. Davis
Sunday, February 9th: Special Guest Speaker Andrew C. Wisely, author of Arthur Schnitzler and the Discourse of Honor and Dueling as well as Twentieth-Century Criticism of Arthur Schnitzler due out this spring.
Lighting Design
Josh Bradford Costume Design
Theresa Squire Associate Costume Designer
Naama Greenfield
Saturday, February 15th: (following the matinee) Adapter/Director Jonathan Bank will be joined by Professor Peter Sander, Translation Advisor to discuss the process of adapting Schnitzler’s play into English.
Sound Design
Stefan Jacobs Translation Advisor
Peter Sander
Sunday, February 23rd: Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank and members of the cast will take your questions about Far and Wide.
Assistant Director
Linnet Taylor Casting Director
Sharron Bower Production Stage Manager
Allen Lewis Rickman
Douglas Shearer
Hans Tester
Assistant Stage Manager
Pilar Witherspoon
SPECIAL POST SHOW EVENTS:
Set Design
Lisa M. Webb Associate Producer
Ted Altschuler Press Representative
David Gersten & Associates Graphic Design
Jude Dvorak
Also: Monday, February 10th at 6:30 p.m. at The Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street (please note the location) Join adapter/director Jonathan Bank and Dr. Frank Hentschker from the Graduate Center, C.U.N.Y. in a special evening of conversation on the life and work of Arthur Schnitzler, complete with a film clip and short story reading. Co-presented at the beautiful new Austrian Cultural Forum by Mint Theater, A.C.F. and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center & the Graduate Center, C.U.N.Y. (seating is limited).
I ordered tickets for the Mint Theater’s Far and Wide for____________________2003 at________pm. I paid by___credit card ___ check #____. The address is at 311 West 43rd Street – 5th floor. (please keep this for your records.)
By Arthur Schnitzler Adapted and Directed by Jonathan Bank
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Performances: February 7th through March 9th. Performance times: Tues., Wed. & Thurs. at 7:00; Fri. & Sat. at 8:00; Sat & Sun. at 2:00
f o r m
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Regular tickets $35 - your discount with this flyer: • $19.00 for preview performances: February 7th - 23rd. • $28 for performances from February 25th - March 9th.
For Tickets By Mail: Fill out the form below including your phone number and e-mail address. Mail to Mint Theater Company, 311 W. 43rd St. 5th floor, NY, NY 10036. Please allow five days for processing. Include a self addressed stamped envelope if you would like your tickets mailed. Otherwise tickets will be held at the box office. For Tickets By Phone: Call (212) 315-0231. A $2.00 service charge will be added to all phone orders. Mention code: "F&W28" For Tickets On-line: Order your tickets on-line at www.minttheater.org For Tickets in person: Our box office window is open one hour prior to show time beginning February 7th. For Groups of 15 or more: Call 212/315-9434 and speak to Ted Altschuler about discounted group rates. 1st choice: Date_______/________Time______# of tickets ______x $19/$28= $_____
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FEBRUARY 7TH THROUGH MARCH 9TH Tues., Wed., Thurs. at 7 pm; Fri. & Sat. at 8 pm, Sat. and Sun at 2 pm
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$19.00 tickets for performances Feb. 7th through February 23rd $28 tickets from February 25th thru March 9th
Phone ________________________________________________ E-mail_______________________________________________________________
To order tickets call (212) 315-0231 (use code FLY28) Or visit our on-line Box Office: www.minttheater.org Performances at the Mint Theater 311 W. 43rd St. 5th floor
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MTC-Far and wide
1/6/03
5:05 PM
Page 2
“How often in a season, a decade, a lifetime can you see a work of genius on a nearby stage? A work of genius, moreover, that you did not even know existed? Such a play is Arthur Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land (1911).” - John Simon, New York Magazine
By Arthur Schnitzler
“A work of genius that you did not even know existed…”
by Arthur Schnitzler Mint Theater Company, “that truffle hound of half-buried treasures from the past” has a celebrated reputation for excavating such worthy but neglected treasures as Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and The Charity that Began at Home by St. John Hankin. This February Mint will offer New York audiences their first opportunity to see Austrian master Arthur Schnitzler’s brilliant 1911 play Das weite Land in a new English language adaptation (Far and Wide) by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank.
“Schnitzler’s play keeps you on the tenterhooks usually reserved for thrillers. It is written not so much in lines as in beams of ironic light, each wickedly or wistfully illuminating some further human insight or folly, or hopeless tangle of both. It is so wittily cynical yet also achingly compassionate that it keeps you excitedly spinning between hilarity and heartache as you follow this saddest, funniest, truest of commentaries on the hell of loving and the hell of not loving.
Don’t miss out on this rare opportunity to see “a work of genius that you did not even know existed…” “Not for nothing did Freud view Schnitzler, with a mixture of reverence and pique, as his secular alter ego; I know of no playwright or fiction writer who understood the vagaries of love, sex, and obsession…better than this still underrated Austrian giant. A physicianturned-writer, he had the most uncannily penetrating, witty and tragic view of every cranny of man-woman relations, and expressed it with a kind of ruthless lyricism. It is Freud translated into a highly poetic, easefully musical prose; it is what you might get from a stethoscope that can hear the unconscious, a stethoscope that can sing. “Das weite Land is a series of concentric circles. There is the story of Freidrich Hofreiter, a prosperous Viennese businessman, charming hedonist and faithless husband; Genia, his lovely, loving faithful, confusedly suffering wife; and Otto von Aigner, an innocent, generous young naval lieutenant. Beyond that, there is the estrangement of Otto’s parents, the worldly hotelier, Dr von Aigner, and his divorced actress wife. And beyond that is the recent past, in which a brilliant young pianist killed himself out of unrequited love for Genia, and the near future, in which the twenty-year old, headstrong Erna may become Freidrich’s next mistress, thus foiling the marital hopes of Freidrich’s physician and best friend, the decent and sensible Dr. Mauer. …A swirling constellation of idle, intriguing, tormenting and tormented humanity, playing the not
dissimilar games of tennis and life, inflicting and enduring spasms of love, and for all their cleverness, not fathoming what any of it is about.” John Simon (Excerpted from a 1981 review of the Hartford Stage
“… k e e p s y o u e x c i t e d l y spinning between hilarity and heartache…”
Arthur Schnitzler (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.
In 1911, when Das weite Land premiered, Schnitzler’s popularity was such that the play opened simultaneously in nine cities including Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Prague and Vienna (where the author took twenty-four curtain calls.) And ninety years later, in the summer of 2002, Das weite Land, was a complete sell-out before the first performance at the Salzburg Festival, and is already scheduled for revival in 2003.
Sigmund Freud wrote Schnitzler a letter in 1922, in honor of his sixtieth birthday, describing the writer as his artistic doppelganger. “Whenever I am absorbed in one of your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very suppositions, interests, and conclusions that are also mine…I have formed the impression that you know through intuition…everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people.”
production of Undiscovered Country, Tom Stoppard’s version of Das weite Land.)
Schnitzler has been the topic of a good deal of recent discussion, an in-depth feature in The New Yorker by Critic-at-Large Leo Carey (9/2/02), and a highly regarded book by historian Peter Gay entitled Schnitzler’s Century. Carey writes that Schnitzler’s “concerns—human psychology, social disintegration, existential angst—have in turn formed those of our own age…behind all the fin-desiècle props lurks something strangely modern.” Mint Theater is proud to bring Schnitzler’s neglected masterpiece to New York theatergoers for the very first time in a brand new English-language version adapted by artistic director Jonathan Bank. Far and Wide plays for 5 weeks only, from February 7th thru March 9th. Don’t miss out on this rare opportunity to see “a work of genius.”
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 probably 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.”
by Arthur Schnitzler - John Simon, New York Magazine
”How often in a season, a decade, a lifetime can you see a work of genius on a nearby stage?“ SPECIAL OFFER Tickets only $19 to $28! 311 W. 43RD STREET, 5TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10036 www.minttheater.org Per mit No. 7528 New York, NY
PAID U.S. POSTAGE NON-PROFIT ORG.