The Madras House

Performances begin st anuary J 31

Limited Engagement!

TUES • WED • THURS – 7PM FRI • SAT – 8PM SAT • SUN – 2PM

Jonathan Bank

For tickets call

Artistic Director

(212) 315-0231

Sherri Kotimsky

Or visit our Online Box Office:

General Manager

w w w. m i n t t h e a t e r. o r g with:

SURROUND EVENTS:

Discussions follow the matinee performances for the first three weeks of the run and last approximately 50 minutes. These discussions are open to the public free of charge. You do not need to attend that days performance to attend our discussions.

Feb. 3rd, 2007: Professor Lana Cable, SUNY, Albany Cable, author of “Popular Secularism and the Idea of Islam on the Early Modern English Stage,” will discuss Constantine Madras, a convert to Mohammedism, in the context of early modern English orientalism in drama and the artistic treatment of Muslim characters and ideas on the stage.

Join us for a reading of

MISALLIANCE

by George Bernard Shaw Monday March 12th at 7:30

Feb. 4th, 2007: Professor Amanda Claybaugh, Columbia University Claybaugh is a professor of English and a specialist in transatlantic literary studies.

She is the author of Cross Purposes: Literary Ambition and Social Reform in the Trans-Atlantic Novel. She will discuss THE MADRAS HOUSE from the perspective of social history.

In 1909 Shaw heard Granville-Barker read an unfinished draft of THE MADRAS HOUSE and was inspired to write his own treatment of the ideas and people Feb. 10th, 2007: Professor Alan Andrews, Dalhousie University that he encountered in his friend’s work.

Andrews is a professor of theater whose principal interest is Shaw and his contemporaries.

“MISALLIANCE was conceived and written as Shaw’s answer to He is the author of the essay “Voysey in Context” published by the Shaw Festival. He will discuss THE MADRAS HOUSE,” the interplay between THE MADRAS HOUSE and Shaw’s MISALLIANCE. writes Professor Cary Mazer.

Feb. 11th, 2007: Professor Martin Meisel (retired), Columbia University Meisel is the author of Shaw and the 19th-Century Theatre and a frequent speaker at the Mint.

This discussion will focus on the play and its author.

Performance at 7:30, Mint Theater.

Tickets $35 Or join us for dinner and a pre-show conversation about the relationship between Shaw and Granville-Barker.

Le Madeleine at 6:00. Tickets $100

Call 212-315-0231 Today!

Save the Date: Monday, June 18th, Mint’s annual Benefit

Feb. 17th, 2007: Professor J. Ellen Gainor, Cornell University Gainor is the author of Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender. She has led many Mint post-show discussions over the last seven years. This discussion will focus on the social context of the play.

Feb. 18th, 2007: Professor Cary Mazer, University of Pennsylvania Mazer was chair of the Theater Arts program at Penn for many years. His published writing includes “Granville Barker and the Court Dramatists,” in The Blackwells Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama. This discussion will focus on the play and its author.

Post-show discussion performances sell out first. Call 212-315-0231 for more information or to book your seats.

ATTEND EARLY AND SAVE! $35 FOR PERFORMANCES JANUARY 31 – FEBRUARY 18 $45 FOR PERFORMANCES FEBRUARY 20 – MARCH 11 Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday at 7pm Friday-Saturday at 8pm & Saturday-Sunday at 2pm

Mary Bacon Ross Bickell Lisa Bostnar Thomas M. Hammond Jonathan Hogan Laurie Kennedy Roberta Maxwell Allison McLemore Pamela McVeagh Mark L. Montgomery George Morfogen Angela Reed Scott Romstadt Kraig Swartz

By: Harley Granville-Barker Directed By: Gus Kaikkonen

CHARLES MORGAN CLINT RAMOS LIGHTS WILLIAM ARMSTRONG SOUND ELLEN MANDEL DIALEC TS AND DRAMATURGY AMY STOLLER CASTING STUART HOWARD, AMY SCHECTER & PAUL HARDT PRODUC TION STAGE MANAGER ALLISON DEUTSCH ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER ANDREA JO MARTIN REPRESENTATIVE DAVID GERSTEN & ASSOCIATES GRAPHICS JUDE DVORAK SETS

PRESS

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Granville-Barker’s dazzling comedy about men and women and sex and shopping (and marriage and children and art and education).

“It is a fantastically rich play that illuminates everything it touches.” (Guardian)

By: Harley Granville-Barker

“This neglected playwright is suddenly one of the hottest new voices in theater.”

(Linda Winer, Newsday)

“ELECTRIFYING!” (The Observer, The Independent)

Phillip Madras is the heir to a leading London fashion emporium established by his father Constantine, a legendary designer who has abandoned his family and the evils of the West, converted to Mohammedism, and established a polygamous household in Iraq. Constantine’s return to England to sell the family business precipitates a series of loosely connected scenes that examine with piercing humor and keen observation the obstacle that sex creates in the daily interaction between men and women.

The award-winning Mint has brought you lost treasures such as: Susan and God, The Daughter-in-Law, John Ferguson and Echoes of the War.

By: Harley Granville-Barker “No British play of this centur y has so excited me.” The Financial Times, 1992 Harley Granville-Barker was one of the most influential figures in the history of the modern theater. “We are all in debt to Granville Barker,” wrote The Guardian just last spring, “His ideas were prophetic and extraordinary.”

He was an inspired director, a visionary producer and a brilliant playwright—and yet he is hardly known in this country.

Even in England THE MADRAS HOUSE is rarely revived, with only three notable productions in the last seventy-five years.

Now, for the first time since 1921, New York audiences will have an opportunity to see Granville-Barker’s dazzling comedy about men and women and sex and shopping (and marriage and children and art and education).

“It is a fantastically rich play that illuminates everything it touches.”1 Phillip Madras is the heir to a leading London fashion emporium established by his father Constantine, a legendary designer who has abandoned his family and the evils of the West, converted to Mohammedism, and established a polygamous household in Iraq.

Constantine’s return to England to sell the family business precipitates a series of loosely connected scenes that serve as “a merciless critique of that ragbag of attitudes we now call ‘family values.’”2 Alexander Woollcott, writing for The New York Times in 1921, claimed that “THE MADRAS HOUSE is a dramatization not of a human being, but of a human problem. The protagonist that wanders through its four abundant acts is not a person. It is a question.

How are the brains of the world to be cleared and the work of the world to be done when that world is necessarily peopled with mutually exciting creatures and its energy so largely devoted to fomenting that excitability?” In other words, what in the world are we to do about the overpowering distraction of sex?

JANUARY 31 thru FEBRUARY 18 Tickets only $35 For preview performances:

“More than matches Barker’s better-known THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE for intellectual scope and subtlety.” -The Times

By: Harley Granville-Barker 311 W. 43rd Street Suite #307 New York, NY 10036 www.minttheater.org

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Michael Billington, Guardian Douglas Slater, Daily Mail

The play is “as rich in episodic detail as a 19th-century novel.” No summary of the narrative “can convey the way this play’s detail becomes so enthralling,” writes Alistair Macauley of The Financial Times, “I had not seen it before; hours after I am still electrified.

No British play of this century has so excited me.”

“A great and unfairly neglected play”

This is “a great and unfairly neglected play;”3 “bracingly intelligent,”4 “a marvelously rich, serious comedy that appeals equally strongly to both the head and heart.”5 “Its characters, situations, lines and arguments are vivid and live keenly in your mind after the curtain’s fall.”6 Harley Granville-Barker’s impact is still keenly felt, here and in England. His Prefaces to Shakespeare revolutionized the approach to staging the plays—in fact some credit him with evolving the role of the modern director as unifier of the creative elements in drama and representative of the author.

Mint, New York’s Number One Source for Lost Plays, first called attention to the neglected genius of Harley Granville-Barker with our New York Premiere of his 1905 masterpiece, THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE. “Few theatrical works so shrewdly raise profound questions about the role of ordinary morality in the making of money, and none in English does it with such elegance and wit,” The New York Times wrote of our production: “A playwright and a company can’t do much better.” THE MADRAS HOUSE, according to Benedict Nightingale of The Times “more than matches Barker’s better-known The Voysey Inheritance for intellectual scope and subtlety.”

Do not miss out on a rare opportunity to see this “electrifying play.”7

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David Clark, What’s On Michael Billington, Guardian 5 Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph 6 Alastair Macauley, Financial Times 7 Michael Covney, Observer 4

Harley Granville-Barker: How he radicalised the British stage The Independent: 20 April 2006

By Paul Taylor It would be hard to exaggerate the seminal role played by the actor, director, playwright and polemicist Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) in the development of 20thcentury British theatre.

Barker fought to create the conditions in which intelligent new drama could flourish, challenging the pernicious system of long runs, lavish settings, and an emphasis on stars that deterred artistic risk.

The repertory movement and the National Theatre for which Barker agitated (drawing up the first detailed Scheme for it in 1907, with the critic William Archer) owe a huge amount to his example and inspiration, as does modern Shakespeare production.

So, Barker’s legacy would have been considerable, had he not also written a clutch of subtle, penetrating plays that combine Chekhovian skill at handling a large ensemble with trenchant social analysis.

The world of Edwardian women, their economic dependence on men and the interaction of fashion and feminism, is viewed in four different environments in his astonishing 1910 piece THE MADRAS HOUSE. I n 1 9 1 8 , B a r ke r a c q u i re d a we a l t h y American wife and retired from the hurly burly of the theatre. The puzzle of what happened psychologically to theatre’s great white hope would make a fascinating, speculative drama - though you would probably need the gifts of Granville-Barker to do it justice.

Excerpted. To read the entire article visit: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/ features/article358911.ece

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