No Time For Comedy

LIGHTING DESIGN Peter West

Leslie Denniston

COSTUME DESIGN Jayde Chabot

Ted Pejovich

“I don’t, on the whole, know just what it is that distinguishes a Behrman play from anything else you’ll see in the theater, I only know that I am always glad to listen to him.”

-Wolcott Gibbs, New Yorker, 1939

Shawn Sturnick

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DIRECTOR Kent Paul SET DESIGN Tony Andrea

Jonathan Bank, Artistic Director Presents

By S.N. BEHRMAN

TEXT COACH Robert Neff Williams PRODUCTION STAGE MANAGER Allison Deutsch STAGE MANAGER Sara E. Friedman PRESS REPRESENTATIVE David Gersten & Associates GRAPHIC DESIGN Jude Dvorak CARTOON BY Peter Steiner

-WITH

Simon Brooking Hope Chernov Diane Ciesla

(expires 4/14/02)

Jason Summers Wednesday nights are Meet the Cast Nights! Please join artistic director Jonathan Bank and members of the cast for a postshow discussion on Wednesday nights.

598 9TH AVENUE, AT 43RD STREET NEW YORK, NY 10036 212.765.7626 “CASUAL” THEATER DISTRICT “FIND FOR ECLECTIC, IMAGINATIVE” NEW AMERICAN FARE THAT’S “WORTH A LOT MORE” THAN IT COSTS. IT’S “WARM”,“WELCOMING” AND “RELIABLE.” -ZAGAT 2001 DINNER, LUNCH

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BRUNCH

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OPEN LATE

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FULL BAR

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CUT HERE AND USE THIS FORM TO ORDER YOUR TICKETS NOW. $19.00 for preview performances: March 19th thru March 23rd, March 24th sold out $35 for performances from March 27th through April 7th Tue., Wed., Thur. at 7:00; Fri., & Sat. at 8:00; Sat. & Sun. at 2:00

MARCH 19-APRIL 7 Tues., Wed., Thurs. at 7:00; Fri. & Sat. at 8:00, Sat. & Sun. at 2:00 Tickets $35.00 ($19.00 for previews March 19th thru March 23rd) To order tickets call (212) 315-0231

FOR TICKETS BY MAIL Fill out the form below including your phone number and e-mail address. Mail orders to Mint Theater Company, 311 W. 43rd St. 5th floor, NY, NY 10036. Please allow seven days for processing. Please include a self- addressed stamped envelope if you would like your tickets mailed to you. Otherwise tickets will be held at the box office.

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“Arthur says this is no time for comedy.”

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

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with today and Behrman’s brilliantly witty, stylish and prescient play will keep us happily entertained while we search for the answer.

“S.N. BEHRMAN wrote twenty-one plays, which were in a vein that was rare in the American theater at the time and is no longer found there at all; high comedy. Among them were The Second Man, Serena Blandish, Biography, Rain from Heaven, End of Summer,

By S.N. BEHRMAN

and NO TIME FOR COMEDY. They are among the finest plays in our theater, and no doubt they will be rediscovered in due course and will again be seen on our stages.” William Shawn, The New Yorker, September 24, 1973

“A COMEDY ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF WRITING COMEDY”

Brought to you by the Obie –winning Mint Theater Company

No Time for Comedy is a comedy with a conscience, written by the great American playwright and essayist S.N. Behrman, the man that The New York Times described as the “American Noel Coward.”

In 1939, Behrman was facing a tumultuous world in rapid transition, on the brink of war. “Sensitive to the tendencies of the moment,” he wrote in describing his own dilemma, and “profoundly affected by them,” Behrman was at a loss as how to best express his concerns in his work.

Behrman’s solution was the creation of playwright Gaylord Easterbrook, who is struggling with the competing needs of his wife, an actress who is depending on him for her next comic vehicle; and the “other woman,” who hopes to inspire in him a higher, more serious artistry. This struggle mirrors Gay’s own misgivings about writing comedy with “the horrors of life pressing in daily and all around us…The hell with that,” he exclaims, “It’s no time for that.”

“Is it true that this is no time for comedy,” asked the New York Herald Tribune back in 1939, “or is this just the day when comedy is most necessary to the preservation of what is left of the world’s sanity?”

It’s a question that we’re tussling

“The most accomplished dialogue now being written for the stage.”

No Time for Comedy wrote the New Yorker when the play premiered, “is one of the pleasantest things around town, carried along suavely by about the most accomplished dialogue now being written for the stage.”

Mint Theater Company, “that truffle hound of half-buried treasures from the past” has rediscovered such worthy but neglected plays as The Voysey Inheritance, Rutherford and Son and most recently, The Voice of the Turtle.

When a play from the past calls to us with a voice that speaks so clearly and so eloquently to our own experiences, we know it is Mint material — and this one certainly fits the bill. No Time for Comedy is another timeless, but timely treasure, a sparkling comedy that “abounds in sharply cut gems of wit.”

S.N. BEHRMAN : A BIOGRAPHY For a man of sophisticated wit, S.N. Behrman was also a man of humble upbringing. The son of Jewish immigrants, born in 1893 and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Behrman studied playwriting at Harvard as a member of George Pierce Baker’s illustrious Workshop 47. His talent for high comedy earned him a reputation as the American Noel Coward, though his work often displayed his deep interest in, and concern for world affairs.

In 1929, his wrote his first piece for The New Yorker, where he quickly became a regular, and much beloved, contributor of essays, profiles and memoirs. Behrman also wrote a number of screenplays including Anna Karenina, The Tale of Two Cities and Ninotchka.

“Look around you. Pick up a newspaper.

Look at the world…And you expect me to sit in my room contriving stage situations for you to be witty in…I tell you it’s all an irrelevance, an anachronism, a callous acquiescence.”

-Gaylord Easterbrook, No Time for Comedy, 1939

NO TIME FOR COMEDYby S.N. Behrman) (Clive Barnes on

Q: “When did people stop writing really well crafted comedies of manners?

A: Possibly when people stopped having manners.”

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