Chains Flyer

New York, NY Pe r m i t N o . 7 5 2 8

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PRAISE FOR THE MINT:

PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

THEATRE ROW 410 WEST 42 STREET MINTTHEATER.ORG

JONATHAN BANK

Company unearths long-forgotten plays and imbues them with new life.

Andy Webster, The New York Times

The Mint does for forgotten drama what Encores! does for musicals. David Rooney, The New York Times

Of all the countless off-Broadway troupes with which the side streets of Manhattan are dotted, none has a more distinctive mission— or a higher artistic batting average—than the Mint Theater Company, which “finds and produces worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” If that sounds dull to you, don’t be fooled: I’ve never seen a production there that was a sliver

less than superb. Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

The Mint Theater makes other companies look ridiculous by lovingly

producing forgotten plays that are much better than many that are repeatedly revived. Jason Zinoman, The New York Times, 2007

For anyone who cares about continuity in theater history, who wants to see connections between playwrights over centuries, the Mint Theater Company is heroic. While the big nonprofits roll out the same greatest hits of Western drama (with very little dramaturgical insight or motivation), the Mint finds obscure but rewarding riches from the shadowy recesses of its vault. David Cote, Time Out New York Mr. Bank is one of a handful of theater artists in America whose name is

an absolute guarantee of quality. Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

Mint Theater Company, resurrectionist extraordinaire of forgotten plays. Ben Brantley, The New York Times

with

Jeremy Beck Kyle Cameron Anthony Cochrane Christopher Gerson Olivia Gilliatt Jeff Gurner Laakan McHardy Andrea Morales Ned Noyes Brian Owen Elisabeth S. Rodgers Claire Saunders Peterson Townsend Amelia White Avery Whitted Theatre Row 410 West 42nd St, between 9th & 10th

Thank heaven for the unwavering commitment of Jonathan Bank, the theatrical archaeologist whose Mint Theater

412 West 42nd St New York, NY 10036

specializes in reviving forgotten plays and playwrights.

Alexis Soloski, The New York Times

“Commands our attention and interest from start to finish.” The Times, 1909

The classiest resurrectionists in town, the Mint Theater Company

CREATIVE TEAM

JENN THOMPSON, JOHN MCDERMOTT, DAVID TOSER, PAUL MILLER, M. FLORIAN STAAB, CHRIS FIELDS, AMY STOLLER, STEPHANIE KLAPPER THIS PRODUCTION IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY: The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

By public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

MEET MISS BAKER: JUNE 29, 2022

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. CHAINS, Elizabeth Baker’s remarkable debut play, begins June 7, 2022, at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd St. 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.” The New Age, 1909

“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.” The Bystander, 1909 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.” The Sun, 1909 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.” The Field, 1910

410 West 42nd St., between 9th & 10th STAGE 4

June 7 through July 23

See a matinee of CHAINS followed by a post-show talk with Mint’s Resident Dramaturgical Advisor. After a break for dinner, return to Theatre Row for a reading of Baker’s play PENELOPE FORGIVES, introduced by Kristin Celello from CUNY Queens College.

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

Since 2013, Maya has worked on sixteen productions at the Mint. She is the author of the book, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For her essay “Beyond the Rue Pigalle: Recovering Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith as ‘Muse,’ Mentor, and Maker of Transatlantic Musical Theater,” published in Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity, Maya was selected as the 2020 recipient of the American Theatre and Drama Society’s Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award. Maya teaches on the Drama and Literature faculties at Bennington College, and received her D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama.

FURTHER READINGS:

PENELOPE FORGIVES

by ELIZABETH BAKER

DIRECTED BY BRITT BERKE JUNE 29, 7:30 PM - TKTS $25 (Free For Members Of The First Priority Club) PENELOPE FORGIVES was produced in 1930, twenty years after Elizabeth Baker burst onto the scene with CHAINS. It tells the story of Penelope Gibbs, who is publicly humiliated when her husband’s infidelity is exposed at a family gathering, ultimately opening the door for everyone to weigh in on whether she should forgive him or not.

PENELOPE FORGIVES had a brief run and was Baker’s only produced play that was never published.

Mint obtained a copy of the typescript from the Lord Chamberlain’s collection at the British Library and is delighted to share it with Mint’s audience, with an introduction by Kristin Celello of CUNY Queens College.

“Miss Baker has once again shown that she can write with sympathy, understanding and not a little humour, about mankind’s frailties.” The Era, 1930

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, 7/12 NO 7:30 PM PERFORMANCE 6/29 , 7/6 NO 2:00 PM PERFORMANCE 6/08

Premium Seating $80 (+ fees and service charge) Standard Seating $65 (+ fees and service charge) CheapTix $35 (+ fees and service charge)

MAYA CANTU: JUNE 29, AFTER THE MATINEE “How Came Miss Elizabeth Baker...?: The Critical Reception of CHAINS.”

$2.50 restoration fee $4.00 Phone / Internet service charge

KRISTIN CELELLO is Associate Professor of History at Queens College. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Virginia in 2004. She is the author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and the co-editor of a volume titled Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her current book project is After Divorce: Parents, Children, and the Modern American Family.

Interested in joining Kristin, Maya and members of the Mint team for dinner between the show and the reading? Call 212-315-9434 and we’ll get back to you with details.