A Little Journey

New York, NY Permit No. 7528

special discount offer!

pa i d

at the Mint Theater (311 West 43rd Street, third floor)

non - profit u . s . postage

May 12ththrough July 10th

artistic director

jonathan bank GE N ERAL M A N AGER

sherri kotimsk y

performances

to purchase tickets:

Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday at 7pm

by mail or in person

311 West 43rd Street, #307, NY 10036 by phone (212) 315-0231 ($2.50 service charge applies)

Friday & Saturday at 8pm Saturday & Sunday at 2pm

by fax (212) 977-5211

box office

12-6 Monday through Friday.

Weekend Hours (Beginning May 14): 10-6 Saturday, 11-3 Sunday

online minttheater.org No service charge for online orders!

All tickets are held at the Box Office.

cheap tix

You don’t have to be a cheapskate to appreciate a bargain, especially these days.

Mint Theater Company is now offering a LIMITED NUMBER of seats at HALF-PRICE ($27.50) for EVERY PERFORMANCE. If you need to know where you’ll be sitting, this isn’t for you: “You pays your money and you takes your chances”. You won’t find a deeper discount anywhere, so order them now while you still can. Cheap Tix may be ordered in advance, but once they’re gone, they’re gone.

NEXT AT THE MINT:

Temporal Powers Teresa Deevy

AUGUST 4

th

Directed by

through

Jonathan Bank

OCTO B ER 2 n d

Mint re-introduced Teresa Deevy to the world in the summer of 2010 with our production of her brilliant play WIFE TO JAMES WHELAN. This coming summer we will bring you another remarkable play from this wonderful Irish writer.

Temporal Powers shared first-prize in the Abbey Theatre’s New Play competition in 1932. The judges called it “strikingly original and of fine literary quality” and The Irish Times described it as “one of the most thoughtful works seen for some time at the Abbey;” it is a play “that sends the audience home with food for thought.”

The play tells the story of Michael and his wife Min on the day they are evicted from their home. They take shelter in an abandoned ruin and discover a large sum of money hidden in the walls. This buried treasure represents either salvation or downfall. “Miss Deevy knows her people,” the Independent wrote, “but the angle from which she regards them is unusual.

It is not distortion, but rather that sublime quality in the artist, originality.”

Rachel Crothers by

Directed by

Jackson Gay

Jennifer Blood M c Caleb Burnett Anthony L. Gaskins Ben Hollandsworth Victoria Mack Joey Parsons Rosemary Prinz Douglas Rees Ben Roberts Chet Siegel SamaNtha Soule John Wernke Craig Wroe

May 12th through

July 10th Sets Roger Hanna Costumes Martha Hally LIGHTs Paul Whitaker SOUND Jane Shaw DRAMATURG Heather J. Violanti STAGE MANAGER Samone B. Weissman ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER Andrea Jo Martin ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Katherine Schroeder

(212) 315-0231 www.minttheater.org

WITH

Laurie Birmingham

311 W. 43rd St. 3rd Floor New York, NY 10036

By

“There’s nothing like a good hit in the head to make us see stars we didn’t know were in the firmament.”

Save $15 per ticket May 12 - June 19. pay only $40! (use code mint40) Regular price $55

GRAPHICS hey jude design, INC ILLUSTRATION Stefano Imbert PRESS David Gersten & Associates CASTING Stuart Howard, Amy Schecter

& Paul Hardt

New York Herald

Ten strangers on a train take the ride of their lives in A Little Journey

by Rachel Crothers (author of Susan and God, seen at the Mint in 2006).

This heartfelt human comedy, one of Crothers’ best, was nominated for the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1918.

Set entirely on a westbound train over the course of a four day trip, A Little Journey tells the story of Julie Rutherford, a proud but broken young woman who believes that things cannot possibly get any worse—until disaster strikes.

“A compelling human story of love and sorrow” was how the Washington Post greeted the play, which, in the grand tradition of travelogues, showcases an eccentric and charming array of passengers: There’s the auburn-topped lady from New York, excruciatingly funny in her ultra-sophistication and yet human. There are two young college lads, awkward, yet lovable. There’s the sweet young girl, traveling with her deaf grandma; there is the selfcentered plutocrat who travels in the drawing room; there is a mother—an unmarried mother; and there are Jim West, the big-hearted Westerner, and Julie Rutherford, the girl who finds real life after having been hedged about and bound by conventions and traditions.

Julie’s down on her luck, and Jim (“the big-hearted Westerner”) is a lonely rancher who’s survived his own troubled life journey. Jim falls in love, but Julie sinks deeper into despair…until a dangerous detour gives them an unexpected chance at happiness.

“A simple moving story deftly and very convincingly told” wrote John

Corbin in the New York Times, while in the New York World, Charles Darnton deemed the play “by far the finest play Miss Crothers has written” praising its “simple human feeling.”

Achieving that “simple human feeling” was Crothers’ goal. She was inspired to write the play while riding on a train, struck by how travel “brought together such characters as I required.”

This Little Journey happens somewhere every day, and it means merely a bundle of humanity tied together by circumstances, each part of the bundle struggling to keep itself free and separate by the force of its own tremendous ego, but finally melted into a common whole by forces stronger than selfishness.

A Little Journey ran for 252 performances on Broadway, transferring from the Little Theater to the Vanderbilt during its run. The New York Herald reported audiences were so moved they lingered in their seats afterward “to cling to the men and women of Miss Crothers’ imagination as one would hold onto friends.”

After Broadway, A Little Journey toured the country, making notable stops in Washington and Chicago.

In 1927, it was made into a silent film (now lost) starring Harry Carey, Billy Haines, and Claire Windsor.

A handful of amateur and stock productions followed in the 1920’s and 1930’s, but then the train stopped….and A Little Journey hasn’t been seen since.

Hop on board for what the New York Herald called “a big adventure of the soul”….performances start May 12th.

Rachel Crothers (1878-1958) was among America’s most successful and produced playwrights during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Nearly 30 of her plays opened on Broadway between 1906 and 1937. “Although it rare now to find anyone who has heard of her,” wrote the New York Times in 1980, “Miss Crothers at the apex of her career was a symbol of success in the commercial theater.”

Crothers’ first Broadway success was with the melodrama The Three Of Us in 1906. While more sensational than her later work, The Three of Us hinted at Crothers’ interest in strong women characters and social concerns. Her best work would recast the European “problem play” in a distinctly American idiom, with richly-drawn characters and sparkling dialogue. A Man’s World (1910), heralded by one New York critic as the “first great American play,” followed a young woman’s struggle to establish an artistic career while raising an adopted son. Nice People (1921) examined the flapper phenomenon through the eyes of three young women and

provided Katharine Cornell and Tallulah Bankhead with their first important roles. In Susan and God (1937), a socialite discovers the difference between public façade and personal faith while reconciling with her husband and daughter.

Crothers directed her own work.

Her consistently high standards helped professionalize the role of director in American theater. She was also a dedicated philanthropist.

She helped found many important charities, including the American Theater Wing for War Relief (established 1940), which evolved into today’s American Theater Wing.

By the late 1940’s, Crothers’ comedies fell out of fashion. She continued writing, but she did not produce any of her new plays, preferring to focus on her charity work. She died in her sleep on July 5, 1958. The Times wrote in her obituary: “She was as skillful as she was prolific. Miss Crothers mixed an enormous amount of common sense with smooth craftsmanship and a rare knowledge of and faith in human nature.”

enrichMINT events EnrichMINT Events are supported in part by a grant from The New York Council for the Humanities and the Michael Tuch Foundation.

All events take place immediately after the performance and usually last about fifty minutes.

They are free and open to the public. Speakers and dates subject to change without notice.

Talking about Rachel Crothers Saturday May 14th, after the matinee: Zoe Corell Dr. Zoe Corell has been a professor of theater and literature for many years. She received her PhD in Dramatic Literature, History, and Criticism from CUNY’s Graduate Center where she wrote her dissertation on Rachel Crothers, and attended London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Sunday May 15th, after the matinee: Judith Barlow Dr. Judith E. Barlow recently retired from the University at Albany, SUNY, where she was a Professor of English for thirty-five years as well as a member of the Women’s Studies faculty. She is the author of Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays and editor of Plays By American Women, 1900-1930, Plays By American Women, 1930-1960, and Women Writers of the Provincetown Players: A Collection of Short Works. Judith has been a visiting professor at Sofia University in Bulgaria and Nankai University in China, and has lectured widely on modern drama.

Saturday May 21st, after the matinee: Sharon Friedman Dr. Sharon Friedman is an Associate Professor at N.Y.U. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of literary and dramatic criticism, feminist criticism, theories of adaptation, and critical writing across the curriculum. Her publications include Feminism as Theme in Twentieth-Century American Women’s Drama in American Studies.

Sunday May 22nd, after the matinee: Brenda Murphy Dr. Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she has taught since 1989, following fourteen years as a faculty member and administrator at St. Lawrence University. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (1999).

Saturday June 4th, after the matinee: Colette Lindroth Dr. Collette Lindroth is Professor of English at Caldwell College and co-author of Rachel Crothers: A Research and Production Sourcebook. B.A. University of North Dakota, M.A. Marquette University Ph.D. New York University Office. Special interests include journalism, American literature, literary criticism, film, and theater.

“I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” The Pullman Car Porter Thursday, May 26th, after the 7pm performance: Daniel J. Walkowitz

Leslie Hendrix in Susan and God Photo by Richard Termine

Long-time Mint attendees know Rachel Crothers as the author of Susan and God. Named one of the Top Ten productions of 2006 by the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout called Susan and God “a major event, a pitch-perfect production of a play whose subject matter is so modern in flavor in could have been written last week.”

Rail travel in early twentieth-century America brought strangers together onto rail cars made and serviced by two unions whose recent histories have become lore in the history of American labor, the African American sleeping car porters and the American Railway Union. The 1894 Pullman Strike would catapult Eugene V. Debs to prominence in American labor and ultimately as leader of American socialism, but the strike’s outcome and the intervention of the government would also set precedents that would shape the history of public work and public service in the US to the present.

Professor Daniel J. Walkowitz holds joint appointments in the department of Social & Cultural Analysis and Department of History at New York University. A specialist in American labor and urban history, his most recent books are City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America, and an edited collected with Donna Haverty-Stacke, Rethinking US Labor History.

DID YOU KNOW? Video recordings of some of our EnrichMint Events are now available for viewing on your computer? Visit our website: http://www.minttheater.org/EnrichMint.html