FPC Newsletter Fall 2021 - The Daughter-in-Law

Dear Friend, Mint Theater Company is alive and well and planning a new production for the winter with performances beginning February 3rd at New York City Center Stage II. Hooray!

It has been two years since we last announced a new production—a time of great uncertainty for all of us. One thing I’ve been sure of is that Mint’s loyal friends are eager to see more plays. Your generous support and your kind words have been encouraging and sustaining. I never doubted that Mint’s supporters would be eager to join us again when the time was right.

412 West 42nd St. New York, NY 10036

Is the time right? Yes! (Of course, everyone will decide that for themselves.)

So much has changed over the last two years. Priorities have shifted for many people in many ways. For me, the kind of plays I want to share with you remains the same—the Mint has always run along the lines of my taste and that’s not going to change.

www.MintTheater.org (212) 239-6210

But one thing will be different. After more than 25 years of running a box office—we are no longer going to be taking calls or handling any ticketing. First Priority Club members will get advance notice (like this newsletter) and a discount code for purchasing tickets online, in person, or over the phone directly from the theater’s box office. (If you are entitled to free tickets, we’ll still handle those bookings.)

FIRST PRIORITY CLUB NEWS

I have always believed that providing outstanding service is as important as creating outstanding productions and I am confident that you will be well taken care of. I think we will miss talking with you more than you will miss talking with us—but in this new world of remote work, it really is no longer practical.

Thank you for your understanding and your unflagging support.

Best wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving and a Happy Holiday season.

I can’t wait to see you!

Jonathan Bank As a year-end gift to all of our friends, we will be offering free, ondemand streaming of our archival recording of Hindle Wakes by Stanley Houghton, from November 29 through December 26.

You’ll find this play a great companion piece to our upcoming production. Turn the page for all the details.

Jill Tanner in Hindle Wakes. Photo by Todd Cerveris.

Yours sincerely,

The Daughter-in-Law

by D.H. Lawerence directed by Martin Platt

02/03/22 to 03/20/22 Live on Stage - On Sale Now!

Mint Theater Company will return to live performances in 2022 with a new production of The Daughter-in-Law by D.H. Lawrence, first produced by the Mint in 2003, one of our most popular and successful productions. The original six-week run was extended to four months, introducing the Mint to thousands of theatergoers for the first time.

“Proof that theater history is worth excavating,” The New York Times declared when naming it among the Best Productions of the Year. (Read the 2003 review on the back page).

Neither produced nor published in Lawrence’s lifetime, The Daughter-in-Law first appeared in print in 1965 when a complete edition of Lawrence’s plays was published for the first time. Three years later The Royal Court presented the world premiere. The Guardian called it “One of the great British dramas of the 20th century.”

Written in 1913 and set against the background of the impending national coal strike of 1912, Lawrence tells the story of Luther Gascoyne, a young miner, and his newly wed wife Minnie, a former governess. The tensions and misunderstandings they suffer due to their different backgrounds and expectations are exacerbated by the powerful influence of Luther’s mother and brought to open conflict when it is discovered that Luther, before his marriage, made another woman pregnant. As the labor unrest comes to a boil, so does the simmering conflict between Luther and Minnie.

“...so well-constructed, so brutally intimate and so psychologically shrewd...” – The New York Times

NY CITY CENTER STAGE II

ON SALE NOW! Performances February 3 through March 20, 2022 Tue - Sat at 7:30pm Wed, Sat, & Sun at 2:30 At NY City Stage II 131 W 55th ST (between 6th and 7th)

2 4

premium seAting $80 $45* stAndArd seAting $65 $35* cheAptix $35 Accessible seAting lAte seAting *exclusive Fpc price

*FPC Members pay our 2003 Price: Use code FPC03 $35 Standard tickets (limit 2) $45 Premium tickets (limit 2) (+ fees and service charge )

Ticket Info NYCITYCENTER.ORG Phone 212.581.1212 Box Office 131 W 55TH ST

2021 / 2022 SEASON

02/03/22 to 03/20/22

06/02/22 to 07/24/22

HINDLE WAKES

The Daughter-in-Law

CHAINS

directed by

by D.H. Lawerence directed by Martin Platt

by Elizabeth Baker directed by Jenn Thompson

Streaming on demand at:

NY City Center Stage II

TheaterRow Stage 4

MintTheater.org

Book your tickets today!

Tickets on sale soon.

by

Stanley Houghton Gus Kaikkonen

HINDLE WAKES Stanley Houghton directed by Gus Kaikkonen by

On demand at: MintTheater.org 11/29/21 to 12/26/21

2021 / 2022 SEASON

11/29/21 to 12/26/21

“The Mint Theater’s Streaming Series was a critical lifeline for me during the pandemic. I had seen several of the original productions, so revisiting them brought me right back into the theater! And I love that so many have now been introduced to the Mint through this series.”

“I’d never even heard the name of Stanley Houghton before the Mint announced its latest revival, a Houghton play called Hindle Wakes that hasn’t been staged in the U.S. since 1922. Were it being produced by any other company in New York, I’d probably have passed on so obscure an offering, but the Mint’s infallible record of success led me to roll the dice. It was the right call, too: I’m thrilled to discover at long last so unjustly forgotten a playwright, and eager to “I am happy that you had see more of his work.” the foresight to record these – Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal

Visit MintTheater.org and follow the simple instructions. Available free and on demand, all you have to do is login with your email address.

Use our Closed Captioning to heighten your enjoyment of the charming local dialect!

CHAINS

productions, and are able to make them available. I look forward to watching each of them. I unaccountably have never attended a live show at the Mint, But I know I will in the future.”

by Elizabeth Baker directed by Jenn Thompson

06/02/22 to 07/24/22 - On Sale Soon!

On March 11, 2020 – the day before New York theaters were shut down, we completed casting for our production of Chains, which was set to be the second installment in “Meet Miss Baker”, our three play project dedicated to exploring the work of Elizabeth Baker, which began with our 2019 production of The Price of Thomas Scott.

Elizabeth Baker was literally an overnight success in 1909 when her first play, Chains had a one-performance try-out at the Royal Court in London. She went from “obscure stenographer making five dollars a week” to “one of the most widely discussed playwrights in London.” The Times and The Globe both called Chains “remarkable.” Soon after, Baker’s drama was running in repertory with the plays of Galsworthy, Barrie, Granville Baker, and Shaw. The New Age called Chains “the most brilliant and the deepest problem play by a modern British writer since Major Barbara.”

Theater Row Stage 4 in June 2022, stay tuned for the exclusive FPC ticket pre-sale.

June 16, 2003

THEATER REVIEW; D. H. Lawrence’s Young Wisdom

by Bruce Weber

“The Daughter-in-Law,’’ a play by D. H. Lawrence, written probably in 1913, about the time he was working on “Sons and Lovers,’’ is interesting in so many ways that it’s hard to know where to begin. For one thing it was literally a script tossed in a drawer and forgotten, remarkable given the pedigree of the author, and it was neither published nor performed in Lawrence’s lifetime. Astonishingly, it was not seen until the Royal Court in London put it on in 1967.

That it remains an obscure work is equally surprising, because Lawrence’s tale of a marriage strained by class conflict is so well-constructed, so brutally intimate and so psychologically shrewd that it has the prescience and dimensions of an important modernist work.

Literally a dining room drama, it isn’t, finally, a great play, but even toward the end, when the playwright’s youth – Lawrence was not yet 30 in 1913 – and romantic faith outweigh his art, “The Daughter-in-Law’’ is never less than fascinating. And in its portrayal of characters who, each painfully circumscribed by his or her own psychological qualities, beat on one another with merciless repetition and mounting frustration, it is reminiscent of no other playwright so much as O’Neill.

in a remarkably frank discussion of a morally dicey predicament. It turns out that Luther’s dalliance with Mrs. Purdy’s daughter, just weeks before his hasty marriage to Minnie, has resulted in a pregnancy.

The forthrightness of Lawrence’s presentation of the sexual aspects of the story is downright stunning; the play is no less salacious than, say, “Peyton Place,’’ but it is written with the emotional insight of a genuinely literary intelligence. There is not an ounce of coyness in Lawrence’s script, and each character has a fully grounded and virtually unshakable sense of his or her own just deserts, and as these expectations bang into one another again and again, the pain that is created is both viscerally sharp and chronically throbbing. Rarely do you see lives so persuasively scraped raw onstage....

In its strong new production by the Mint Theater Company, directed with determined naturalism by Martin L. Platt, “The Daughter-in-Law’’ will feel especially familiar to anyone who has seen... “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’’ which it predates by more than four decades, but which is set, coincidentally, in the same year, 1912.

That was the year of a national coal-mining strike in England, an event in the background of the play, which takes place in the Nottinghamshire region where Lawrence, the son of a miner, was reared. Luther Gascoyne, the miner at the center of the play, is a young man of earthy tastes who never aspired to anything other than what he has become, a working man who comes home each night to a wife. His wife, Minnie, however, is a former governess with higher-minded, society tastes, and it is only weeks into the marriage that their mutual irritation erupts in an ugly display.

But we don’t meet either of the two central characters until after a long prologue, in which the play’s other three figures – Luther’s domineering mother, his younger brother Joe and a neighbor woman, Mrs. Purdy – engage

Orginal Poster from 2003 - Mint Theater Company