The Lonely Way

12/22/04

1:19 PM

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SURROUND EVENTS: THE LONELY WAY

SAVE THE DATE:

Discussions last approximately 50 minutes and can be attended by all Mint patrons free of charge.

Monday, May 2nd FINDING J. M. BARRIE

Arthur Schnitzler and Fin de Siecle Vienna – Sat. Feb. 5 following the matinee Join Mark Anderson, Prof. of Germanic Languages (Columbia Univ.) for a discussion on turn-of-the-century Vienna and one of the leading figures of its literary avant-garde—Arthur Schnitzler. Anderson is the author of the upcoming Uncanny Nation: The Jewish-German Origins of Modernity from Paris to Bayreuth. He holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, and L’Université de Paris.

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR JONATHAN BANK PRESENTS

Translating Schnitzler – Sat. Feb. 12 following the matinee Meet Margret Schaefer, the translator of Mint’s newly commissioned version of Der Einsame Weg. Schaefer has also published two volumes of Schnitzler’s short fiction—Night Games (2002) and Desire and Delusion (2003) and is currently working on a 3rd. She received her Ph. D. from U.C. Berkeley and has taught Comparative Literature at Berkeley, San Francisco State and the Univ. of Illinois, Chicago. Books will be available for purchase.

Psychoanalysis and Literature in Vienna - Sat. Feb. 19 following the matinee Martin Harries, Assoc. Prof. of English (NYU) will speak on the intersection of two powerful forces shaping turn-of-the-century thought. He has published in New German Critique, Theatre Journal and The Yale Journal of Criticism and is at work on his 2nd book: Lot’s Wife: Looking Back at Disaster in the Twentieth Century. Harries was educated at Yale, Columbia and Cambridge Universities and has also taught at Yale, Williams College and Princeton.

Parents, Children and Identity – Sat. Feb. 26 following the matinee The Lonely Way raises compelling questions about identity. A child discovers his parents are not who he thought they were. A parent seeks a relationship with the child they gave up for adoption. Join two experts from the Association of Marriage and Family Therapists who will discuss the psychological and social questions raised by The Lonely Way. Also: Mint Artistic Director Jonathan Bank and members of the cast will talk about the play and take your questions after the performance every Thursday night in February.

-PLEASE KEEP FOR YOUR RECORDS-

SET DESIGN VICKI R. DAVIS

I ordered tickets for THE LONELY WAY for_______ 2005 @ __pm.

Paid By: ❏ Visa/MC/Amex ❏ Check #___ The Mint Theater is located at 311 West 43rd Street, 5th floor All tickets will be HELD at the Box Office and are available for pick-up ONE HOUR prior to curtain. NO LATE SEATING Policy Strictly Enforced!

LIGHTING DESIGN BEN STANTON COSTUME DESIGN HENRY SHAFFER

How to purchase your tickets for THE LONELY WAY:

PROPS SPECIALIST JUDI GURALNICK

• By Mail (or) In-Person: Mint Theater Company (No Service Charges) 311 West 43rd Street, 5th floor New York, NY 10036 • By Phone: (212) 315-0231 ($2.50 per ticket service charge will apply) • On-line: www.minttheater.org (No Service Charges) • Groups of 15 or more: 212-315-9703 (ask for Ted Altschuler)

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR KIMBERLY MUELLER CASTING DIRECTOR SHARRON BOWER

PRESS REPRESENTATIVE DAVID GERSTEN & ASSOCIATES GRAPHIC DESIGN JUDE DVORAK

$35 for performances February 1st – February 20th $45 for performances February 22nd – March 27th

Performance: Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday at 7pm Friday-Saturday at 8pm & Saturday-Sunday at 2pm

SOUND DESIGN JANE SHAW

ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER SARAH DUNCAN

This year’s gala - Finding J. M. Barrie - presents two more short gems by the writer of Echoes of the War & Peter Pan. It will feature - a cast of New York’s finest talent, a lovely reception and silent auction including some hard to find tickets, health-club memberships, a handmade quilt, fine wine and more!

Call 212-315-0231 to request your invitation.

DIRECTOR JONATHAN BANK

PRODUCTION STAGE MANAGER SAMONE B. WEISSMAN

Question: Do you know where The Old Lady Shows her Medals starring Frances Sternhagen had its first Mint presentation?

Answer: As part of last year’s Gala Benefit!

FEBRUARY 1ST THROUGH MARCH 27TH

Date

Tues., Wed., Thurs. at 7:00; Fri. & Sat. at 8:00, Sat. and Sun at 2:00

1st Choice

To order tickets call (212) 315-0231 Or visit our on-line Box Office: www.minttheater.org Performances at the Mint Theater 311 W. 43rd St. 5th floor Photo courtesy http://philip.greenspun.com

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Mon thru Sat 12-6pm

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Box Office hours will expand February 1st

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2nd Choice

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*All sales are final. There will be no exchanges or refunds.

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MTC-LONELYWAYflyer

E-mail_______________________________________________ ❏ Enclosed is my check made payable to Mint Theater Company ❏ Please charge my Visa, MC or Amex ________-________-________-________ Exp.Date _____/_____ Signature_____________________________________________ ❏ Check if you wish to reserve an Assisted Listening Device. How many? _____

DON’T MISS OUT ON THIS RARE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE “THE TRIUMPHANT RESTORATION OF A BURIED MASTERWORK”

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12/22/04

1:19 PM

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son—a young soldier who has no idea that Julian is his father. “On the one hand, the play is a powerful emotional drama about the desperate hunger for children,”wrote Michael Billington of The Guardian in 1985. “But on a deeper level the play is about lonely individuals haunted by some dream.”

“In Arthur Schnitzler’s The Lonely Way, serious theatergoers can benefit from the discovery of a marvelous play…”-Ned Chaillet,

Wall Street Journal

Mint Theater Company, “that truffle hound of half-buried treasures from the past” is now in it’s thirteenth season excavating such worthy but neglected treasures as J.M. Barrie’s Echoes of the War, The Daughter-in-Law by D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Schnitzler’s Far and Wide.

This February Mint will offer New York audiences their first opportunity to see Austrian master Arthur Schnitzler’s brilliant 1904 play The Lonely Way in a new English translation by Margret Schaefer and Jonathan Bank.

In 2003 Mint introduced New York theatergoers to the neglected talents of one of the 20th century’s most important European playwrights: Arthur Schnitzler.

This winter, we will present another Schnitzler masterwork, The Lonely Way (Der Einsame Weg), in a World Premiere translation, with performances beginning on February 1st, 2005.

Mint’s production of Schnitzler’s Far and Wide (Das weite Land) was a sensational success, quickly selling out its originally scheduled five week run and extending for an additional eleven weeks. Theatergoers who had previously known Schnitzler only from his frequently produced La Ronde were both surprised and enthralled “Schnitzler previously seems to have been served up secondhand with not much of the original taste intact,” wrote Karl Leverett in Backstage. “Suddenly with Far and Wide there’s a plate of meat and potatoes before you. Schnitzler has the most penetrating vision of human relationships, often expressed in the most contradictory terms. The acute psychological insights never falter and make this a sustained drama for the head and heart.

Again, we are in debt to the Mint Theater for this Lazarus-like exhumation.”

The Lonely Way is another substantial and nourishing four-course meal. It is a subtle and redemptive drama that explores the question of what makes a rewarding life. The central story revolves around the brilliant but failed artist Julian Fichtner, who has arrived at middle age with nothing to show for his life-long pursuit of pleasure, freedom and self-expression. After years of restless wandering, Julian returns home in the hopes of giving meaning to his existence by being near his 23 year-old

Billington was writing in response to a 1985 London production featuring Anthony Hopkins and Colin Firth as father and son. The Sunday Telegraph called the play “a truly remarkable piece of drama,” and Billington called the play “extraordinary.”

Mint has commissioned a new translation from Margret Schaefer who has had two volumes of Schnitzler prose translations published in as many years, with a third coming next year. Night Games, which featured an introduction by John Simon, was received with critical acclaim in 2003, as was her second volume Desire and Delusions. Frederick Crews, author of two books on Schnitzler’s compatriot Freud, called “Schnitzler and Schaefer—a perfect marriage, made in Vienna .”

Schaefer will collaborate on the text with Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank; Bank adapted the text for Far and Wide and directed the production—he will also direct The Lonely Way. This haunting play has never been seen in New York and was only produced in the U.S. once in 1931.

The Theater Guild produced an out-of-town tryout in Baltimore and Washington, but when the leading man broke his leg plans to bring the play to New York were shelved. 101 years after it was first written, Mint will give New York theatergoers their first chance ever to see this Schnitzler masterpiece.

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was one of the most famous of all of the great personalities in Vienna at the turn of the last century. Schnitzler wrote over twentyfive plays in addition to numerous stories, novellas and novels. From before 1900 until 1925, Schnitzler was more talked about, and his plays were more performed on the stages of Germany and Austria than any other writer.

In 1903, the year before the premiere of The Lonely Way, Schnitzler married Olga Gussmann, an actress and singer twenty years younger than he was, and they had a son and a daughter.

Sigmund Freud wrote Schnitzler a letter in 1922, in honor of his sixtieth birthday, describing the writer as his artistic doppelganger. “Whenever I am absorbed in one of your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very suppositions, interests, and conclusions that are also mine…I have formed the impression that you know through intuition…everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people.”

Schnitzler was both a Jew and a critic of the Austrian Monarchy, which contributed to the censorship of his work in his lifetime, and by the Nazi’s after his death. His work ultimately suffered the same fate as the Viennese culture that he was describing and vanished into obscurity after Word War I. “If previous ages tended blindly to ignore their geniuses,” writes John Simon, “ours is all too ready to crown as genius the nearest trendy hack. One of the very few masters not fully acknowledged even posthumously is the Viennese playwright-fiction writer Arthur Schnitzler.”

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