On March 11, 2020, Mint Theater Company completed casting for our production of Chains by Elizabeth Baker. The following day, every theater in New York shut down… Now, Miss Baker is back, along with every one of the eleven actors we cast two years ago. Mint returns to Theatre Row with Chains, Baker’s remarkable debut play, beginning June 7, at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd St.
ORDER YOUR TICKETS TODAY! ONLINE: MINTTHEATER.ORG PHONE: (212) 714-2442 EX. 45 IN PERSON: 410 WEST 42ND ST NY, NY 10036 CALL FOR HOURS. PERFORMANCES: Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri, & Sat at 7:30 pm; Wed, Sat, & Sun at 2:00 pm
NO PERFORMANCE: 6/19, 6/24, 7/5, 7/12 NO 7:30 PM PERFORMANCE 6/29 NO 2:00 PM PERFORMANCE 6/08 Use code FPC22 for FPC pricing: Premium Seating $65* Standard Seating $45* CheapTix $35* *(+ fees and service charge) $2.50 restoration fee $4.00 Phone / Internet service charge
Penelope Forgives by
Elizabeth Baker
JUNE 29 - BOOK NOW! ONLINE: MINTTHEATER.ORG PHONE: (212) 714-2442 EX. 45 IN PERSON: 410 WEST 42ND ST NY, NY 10036 CALL FOR HOURS. Mint Further Readings are FREE for members of the First Priority Club, use code FPCMMB.
FURTHER READINGS
In 1909, Elizabeth Baker went from “obscure stenographer making five dollars a week” to “one of the most widely discussed playwrights in London” when Chains had a one-performance “try-out” at the Royal Court in London. The Times and The Globe both called Chains “remarkable.” The next year, Baker’s drama was running in repertory with the plays of Galsworthy, Barrie, Granville-Barker and Shaw and was hailed as “the most brilliant and the deepest problem play by a modern British writer since Major Barbara.” “It is a tale that grips you from the first moment to the last. Every line of it throbs with a real humanity, and the characters that develop from it are living things…Chains is one of the GREATEST PLAYS that has been produced in this country for many a long day, and Suffragists will be delighted to note that it has been written by—a woman.” Chains tells the stories of a few ordinary people yearning for a less ordinary life. Charley lives with his wife Lily in suburban London, sharing a cramped house with a lodger. Charley commutes daily to an office in London, his only pleasure is the tiny garden patch beside the house which gives little satisfaction. Charley’s sister-in-law, Maggie, finds the drudgery of shop work so stifling that she plots an escape by marrying a kind man she doesn’t love—an escape that can’t provide the adventure she craves. Charley & Maggie are both shaken when Charley’s lodger announces that he’s tired of the grind and he’s leaving for Australia—the day after tomorrow. His decision sends a tremor through the family that threatens to break the ties that bind Maggie and Charley to their ordinary lives. “There is a touch of genius in its absolute sincerity and pathos. Not one word too much, not one situation too extreme mars it.” Baker was applauded for her “keenness of observation, her powers of drawing characters from the life, and her gift of writing dialogue that is natural and unforced,” but much of the attention had an astonished, condescending tone. “How came Miss Elizabeth Baker, an unknown, inexperienced playwright, to give us a work so fresh, so unconventional, and in a sense, so stimulating as this? One is given to understand that she has not previously tried her hand at dramatic authorship, and that she has lived laborious days hitherto in a City office as a typewriter. ” Elizabeth Baker “This is Miss Elizabeth Baker, a typist, who though little more than a girl, and absolutely without either stage connections or stage experience, has thus had her first attempt at a full-blown four-act play launched straight away upon the world by one of the keenest and most competent of all dramatic societies.” The Buffalo Sunday Morning News, 1909 Baker may have been just canny enough to allow this misperception of her youth to stand uncorrected. In fact, she was a 32-year-old spinster when Chains was produced. And while it’s true she lacked experience, her success was not the luck of an untaught amateur, it was evidence of her gift and a sign of her ambition. Baker followed Chains with a versatile range of challenging and original plays that premiered on the stages of England’s repertory theaters, as well as in the West End. These included Edith (1912), a one-act feminist comedy for the Women Writer’s Suffrage League; the comic drama The Price of Thomas Scott (1913, Gaiety Theatre, Manchester and Mint Theater Company 2019); and her scintillating business-world comedy Partnership (1917, Court Theatre). Long independent, Baker also found mid-life romance with James Edmund Allaway, a widower who worked in the upholstery trade; she married him in 1915, at the age of forty. In 1922, the pair emigrated for two years to the Cook Islands. Were they inspired by her own characters in Chains, or was her play evidence of a lifelong appetite for adventure? “The author has chosen a subject she knows, a set of people whom she has observed, about whom she has thought keenly, humorously, tenderly; she knows their conditions and their troubles; and she has put them before us with so much wisdom, sincerity, and sympathy, and with so much of the genuine dramatist’s gift of presentation, that their story commands our attention and interest from start to finish.” The Times, 1909