The Charity That Began at Home

MTC-Charity

8/25/02

1:03 PM

Page 1

Mrs. Eversleigh: What I can’t understand is why, if you must be kind to people—which seems to me quite unnecessary—you shouldn’t choose agreeable people instead of disagreeable ones.

SPECIAL POST SHOW EVENTS: Sunday, September 29th A panel discussion on philanthropy and the nature of charity, with special guests Helen Blieberg and Stephen D. Solender. Blieberg is an adjunct professor at New School University and City University of New York. Most recently she was the Fund Administrator of the A.R.T./New York - Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Arts Relief Fund. Solender is President-emeritus of the United Jewish Communities and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the UJA-Federation, New York.

Jonathan Bank, Artistic Director Presents

Saturday, October 5th (following the matinee) Professor J. Ellen Gainor from Cornell University will speak about St John Hankin. Gainor is the author of The Plays of Susan Glaspell: A Contextual Study. She holds degrees from Harvard University, Princeton University, and the Yale School of Drama.

Sunday, October 6th Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, director Gus Kaikkonen and members of the cast will take your questions about The Charity that Began at Home.

The Award-Winning Mint Theater Company

Directed by Gus Kaikkonen September 27th through October 27th Tues., Wed., Thurs. at 7:00, Fri. & Sat. at 8:00, Sat. & Sun at 2:00 $19.00 tickets for previews Sept. 27 through Oct. 6th $35.00 tickets from Oct. 9th thru Oct. 27th.

PAY ONLY $28

IF YOU ORDER BEFORE OCT. 7TH

To order tickets call (212) 315-0231 Or visit our on-line Box Office: www.minttheater.org

With Christopher Franciosa Kristin Griffith Benjamin Howes Karl Kenzler Becky London Lee Moore Troy Schremmer Harmony Schuttler Michele Tauber Pauline Tully Bruce Ward Alice White

In 2002 the Mint was awarded a special Drama Desk Award for “unearthing, presenting and preserving forgotten plays of merit.”

Lady Denison: Mr. Hylton, will you kindly explain to Mrs. Eversleigh why I have to be kind to disagreeable people? I never can remember.

Hylton: You see, Mrs. Eversleigh, agreeable people don’t need friends to be kind to them. They have plenty already. Disagreeable people have not.

Mrs. Eversleigh: If people are disagreeable they don’t deserve kindness.

Hylton: It’s not what people deserve, but what they want that matters, don’t you think? In fact, often the less people deserve the more we ought to help them. They need it more.

Mrs. Eversleigh: I’m afraid that’s hardly a view you can expect me to take seriously. It’s very modern and original, but it’s not serious.

Hylton: I should hardly have called it modern. Usen’t we to be taught that it was our duty to love our enemies?

Mrs. Eversleigh: Yes. But only on Sundays. And no one ever dreamed of doing it. So of course, that didn’t matter. You want Lady Denison to do it.

CUT HERE AND USE THIS FORM TO ORDER YOUR TICKETS NOW. $19.00 for preview performances: September 27-October 6 $28.00 for performances from October 9 through October 27 (Orders must be received by Oct. 7th. Regular price: $35)

Tue., Wed., Thur. at 7:00; Fri., & Sat. at 8:00; Sat. & Sun. at 2:00

Henry Shaffer

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Set Design

Charles F. Morgan

“When it comes to the library,” our 2001 Obie citation states, “there’s no theater more adventurous.”

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William Armstrong Costume Design

Judi Guralnick

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Dialect Coach

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Jude Dvorak

Performances at the Mint Theater 311 W. 43rd St. 5th floor

Seven of your favorite Mint re-discoveries in one great book including photos, historical notes & the stories behind the stories from the artists themselves.

Introduction by Mint Artistic Director Jonathan Bank.

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MTC-Charity

8/25/02

1:03 PM

Page 2

Mint Theater Company, “that truffle hound of half-buried treasures from the past” has a celebrated reputation for re-discovering worthy but neglected plays such as Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and Rutherford and Son by Githa Sowerby.

But Hankin is a complex comedian; his sometimes cynical voice, “seems so modern and insightful.” Hankin’s is “the voice of the ruthless observer and true subversive” and his plays present “a blistering expose of the Edwardian middle-class life.” “We leave the theater disquieted by what we’ve seen. And isn’t that what good theater is all about?”

The Mint is thrilled to bring you another “delightful discovery,” from 1906 England, a brilliantly witty comedy of how one family’s all-consuming commitment to kindness has awful and amusing consequences that turns their household upside down.

Please make plans to join us for the NEW YORK PREMIERE of this neglected treasure.

By St John Hankin

By St John Hankin “St John Hankin is one of the great might-have-beens of the British theatre… I suspect it was Hankin’s wit that made him underrated…elegant, vitriolic jokes, the voice of the ruthless observer and true subversive…” - John Peter, Sunday Times “A writer who has been unjustly neglected….Like Granville Barker at his best, Hankin wrote adult plays for adult people.” - Malcom Rutherford, Financial Times “…astonishingly unperformed…inhabits a political and dramatic world akin to that of Shaw and Granville Barker…profound and pertinent.” - Micheal Arditti, Evening Standard

George Bernard Shaw called St John Hankin “the Mephistopheles of the new comedy.” Hankin wrote five full-length plays between 1903 and his death at the age of forty in 1909. None of them have ever been seen in New York. Shaw eulogized Hankin as “a most gifted writer of the high comedy of the kind that is a stirring and important criticism of life.”

The Charity that Began at Home, Hankin’s third play, tells the story of how one family’s all-consuming commitment to kindness has awful and amusing consequences that turns their household upside down.

Guided by the principles of the “Church of Humanity”, Lady Denison and her daughter Margery write letters for orphans, visit the sick, tolerate incorrigible servants and invite the most disagreeable, boring and ill-tempered people they can find to stay with them, because “It’s not what people deserve but what they want that matters.

In fact,” say the Church’s charming founder Basil Hylton, “often the less people deserve the more we ought to help them—they need it more.”

In 2001 the Shaw Festival in Canada produced Hankin’s second play, The Return of the Prodigal, which became the surprise hit of the season and has been revived again this year (running through Oct. 5). The Orange Tree in London also revived The Return of the Prodigal in 1993.

Both productions were celebrated for bringing light to Hankin’s “insightful construction, and dazzling delineation of character” and to his “wonderfully fertile comic invention.” “What a joy to discover” the critics exclaimed, while extolling Hankin’s comic gifts; the “crisp, at times almost Oscar Wildean dialogue,” and the “paralysingly funny one-liners.”

“What a joy to discover” Hankin, along with Granville Barker and Shaw helped further the revolution that returned the function of social criticism to drama. Granville Barker produced the premieres of both The Return of the Prodigal and The Charity that Began at Home. Hankin was, in fact, the only living dramatist other than Shaw to have more than one full-length play produced at the Royal Court during the important Vedrenne-Barker years from 1904 to 1907.

Granville Barker rated The Charity that Began at Home as the best of Hankin’s plays and Hankin himself agreed.

St John Hankin was a writer truly ahead of his time. When The Dramatic Works of St John Hankin was published in 1912, the New York Times wrote that, “His influence is not to be measured by the fact that the London stage has apparently found no use for him.…To have let a little light and air into the English theater at a time when the windows had for years been shut, and the blinds drawn was no mean accomplishment.”

The Charity that Began at Home will play for five weeks only, beginning on September 27th. Please make your plans now to join us for this thrilling discovery.

The Charity that Began at Home has never been seen in New York, and was last professionally produced in England in 1917. This may truly be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

St John Hankin (1869-1909) St John (pronounced Sin Gin) Hankin began to contribute humorous essays and dramatic parodies including new “lastacts” for well-known plays to Punch magazine in 1898. In 1901 some of his contributions were anthologized as Mr. Punch’s Dramatic Sequels. Hankin also contributed about seventy drama reviews to The London Times before beginning his career as a playwright in 1903 with The Two Mr. Wetherby’s.

Hankin was actively involved in running the Stage Society, a London theater group that supported plays of literary merit, founded in part, to avoid the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship.

During Hankin’s youth his father suffered a nervous breakdown, which left him an invalid. Hankin himself began to suffer from increasing ill health in 1907 and he was plagued with the fear that he would suffer the same fate as his father. On a “dull, sultry, wet” day in June of 1909, St John Hankin tied two seven-pound dumbbells around his neck and drowned himself in the river Ithon. He left his wife a letter expressing his fear that he would “slip into invalidism,” which he could not bear and ended by telling her, “I have found a lovely pool in a river and at the bottom I hope to find rest.” George Bernard Shaw described his death as “a public calamity.”

By St John Hankin 311 W. 43RD STREET, 5TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10036 WWW.MINTTHEATER.ORG Permit No. 7528 New York, NY

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