Walking Down Broadway by Dawn Powell, produced by Mint Theater Company, 2015

MTC-WalkingDownBwyflyer:MTC-ECHOESflyer

5/17/12

9:07 PM

Page 1

SURROUND EVENTS: WALKING DOWN BROADWAY Discussions last approximately 50 minutes and can be attended by all Mint patrons free of charge—you’re welcome even if you’re attending another performance!

Saturday, September 17th following the matinee POWELL THE DRAMATIST Michael Sexton, freelance director and the co-editor (along with Tim Page) of the volume Four Plays by Dawn Powell will talk about his experience working on Big Night and preparing the text for publication.

Saturday, September 24th following the matinee

S through N

EPTEMBER

15TH

OVEMBER

6TH

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

THE WOMEN OF GREENWICH VILLAGE Andrea Barnet, author of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 will speak about some of Powell’s contemporaries and the scene that Powell became a part of after moving to New York in 1918. Andrea Barnet has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review since 1985. Her articles on art and culture have appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, Mirabella, and Self. All Night Party was a nonfiction finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary awards.

Sunday, September 25th following the matinee

W ITH Christine Albright Denis Butkus Antony Hagopian Carol Halstead Amanda Jones Emily Moment Stacy Parker Ben Roberts Cherene Snow Sammy Tunis

Artistic Director

Jonathan Bank presents

A CONVERSATION WITH TIM PAGE Tim Page is nearly single-handedly responsible for the revival of interest in the work of Dawn Powell. He is her biographer, the editor of her diaries and her letters, the editor of The Library of America’s two volume edition of her work, and has written introductions to nearly all of her work that is now in print. Mr. Page is also a Pulitzer-prize winning music critic for The Washington Post.

Post-show discussions with members of the cast will be held after the Wednesday evening performanceson September 21st, 28th and October 5th.

-PLEASE KEEP FOR YOUR RECORDSI ordered tickets for WALKING DOWN BROADWAY for________________ 2005 @ ________pm.

Paid By: ❍ Visa/MC/Amex ❍ Check #_____________ This Mint performance will be held on the 3rd floor at 311 West 43rd Street.

All tickets are HELD at the Box Office - available for pick-up starting ONE HOUR prior to curtain. NO LATE SEATING!

$35 for performances September 15th - October 2nd $45 for performances October 4th - November 6th

✃

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

How to purchase your tickets for WALKING DOWN BROADWAY • By Mail or In-Person: Mint Theater Company (No Service Charges) 311 West 43rd Street, Ste. #307 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) • Special rates available for groups of 15 or more

A World Premiere

By Dawn Powell Directed by Steven Williford Set Design

Lighting Design

Costume Design

Sound Design

Stephen Petrilli

Brenda Turpin

Jane Shaw

Press Representative

Production Stage Manager

Assistant Stage Manager

Graphic Design

David Gersten & Associates

Jason A. Quinn

Noelle Font

Jude Dvorak

Casting

Stuart Howard, Amy Schecter & Paul Hardt

Address_______________________________________________

Mon thru Fri 12-6pm

______________________________________________________

Box Office hours will expand September 15th

City_______________________State______Zip_______________ *Phone (_______)__________________________*For Confirmation

To order tickets call Roger Hanna

Name__________________________________________________

BOX OFFICE HOURS

(212) 315-0231 Or visit our on-line Box Office: www.minttheater.org Performances at Mint Theater, 311 W. 43rd St.3rd floor

Date 1st Choice 2nd Choice 3rd Choice

Time

# of Tkts. Price ($35 thru 10/2 & $45 thereafter)

X

Total

E-mail_________________________________________________

=

I am also including a tax-deductible contribution

TOTAL

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

+

❍ Enclosed is my check made payable to Mint Theater Company ❍ Please charge my Visa, MC or Amex

=

________-________-________-________ Exp.Date _____/______ Signature______________________________________________

MTC-WalkingDownBwyflyer:MTC-ECHOESflyer

5/17/12

9:07 PM

Page 2

A World Premiere

By Dawn Powell

A World Premiere

By Dawn Powell “So full of charm and derring-do that literature’s canon-makers should sit back, smile and say,

Dawn Powell, where have you been all our lives?” (Margo Jefferson, The New York Times) Dawn Powell, now recognized as one of America’s great satirists, was the author of sixteen novels and numerous short stories, but she also wrote ten plays—only two of which were ever produced.

Mint is thrilled to bring you the World Premiere of WALKING DOWN BROADWAY Dawn Powell’s moving story of the collision between small town romance and big city cynicism.

WALKING DOWN BROADWAY shows how hard it is to be honest when starting a new relationship and how devastating it can be if you aren’t.

The award-winning Mint Theater Company brings you The Greatest Plays You’ve Never Seen such as The Daughter-in-Law, Echoes of the War, Far and Wide and The Skin Game.

Dawn Powell, author of 16 novels, over 100 stories and 10 plays, was undervalued in her lifetime and virtually forgotten after her death—although she has never been without her ardent fans. Gore Vidal, a friend and champion, wrote an essay in 1981 declaring Powell a “comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens.” In 1987, Vidal wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books stating that Powell, “should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald...” And the comparison’s continue to stack up—the 1998 review of Powell’s biography in The New York Times asserts that Powell is “wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh...”

The last fifteen years have seen a great resurgence of interest in Powell’s writing, led by the indefatigable efforts of Tim Page, Powell’s biographer and a PulitzerPrize winning music critic for The Washington Post. Page is the person primarily responsible for seeing her work returned to print; in addition to writing her biography, he has also written introductions to most of the reissued volumes, served as editor of the Library of America’s two volume set released in 2001, and was the editor of a volume of letters as well as her diaries, released in 1995—described by Terry Teachout in The New York Times as “one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter-century.”

The New York Times review of her Selected Letters goes so far as to say that “one is tempted to suggest that what we now think of as the contemporary American voice—in journalism and the arts—is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York just after the First World War.” While Powell’s prose is now enjoying a much-deserved revival of interest, she

was also the author of ten plays, only two of which were ever produced. She dreamed of success as a playwright from her college days, but that proved to be even more elusive for her than as a novelist.

The legendary Group Theater ruined her hard driving satiric comedy Big Night with ponderousness in 1933, and the Theater Guild failed to make a success of Jig Saw the following year, despite Brooks Atkinson’s description of Powell’s “flair for breezy patter and topsy-turvy sophistication.”

Walking Down Broadway was written in 1931 and never produced; although Erich von Stroheim bought the rights and made the movie Hello, Sister, which bears almost no resemblance to Powell’s play.

Walking Down Broadway will receive its world premiere at the Mint.

Marge and Elsie are two young girls newly arrived in New York from Marble Falls, Ohio. They work in an office, live in a rooming house on the upper west side and dream of the romance and glamour that lured them away from home in the first place. Unable to bear another night alone, they take to walking up and down Broadway where they meet two equally lonely young men. Walking Down Broadway tells the story of love and lost innocence as unspoiled small-town naiveté collides with the bitterness and cynicism of world-weary New Yorkers—a theme that runs through almost all of Powell’s writing.

J.B. Priestly wrote that Powell’s “best work represents an admirable mixture, not often found, of humor, genuine sentiment (born of compassion), and very shrewd and sharp satire.” Satire is what Powell is now best know for. Writing in her diary in 1936, Powell called satire “the technical term for writing of people as they are; ‘romantic’ the other extreme of people as they are to themselves—but both of these are the truth.”

Walking Down Broadway is romantic— bittersweet, touching and true. Written more than ten years after Powell’s own arrival in New York from Ohio, it is tinged with nostalgia and yet unsparing, honest and almost startling for its mixture of romance and frankness.

Mint is thrilled to offer you the World Premiere of this very special play as the first in a season devoted to American Women writers.

Dawn Powell “Always sharp, never cranky, and with a pagan’s delight in the pleasures of this world, Powell’s work elaborates the human comedy with a vigor matched only by its unpretentious wisdom,” wrote one of her critics.

Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1896, Dawn Powell ran away from an abusive stepmother when she was thirteen and settled with her unconventional aunt in nearby Shelby, Ohio. “Auntie May,” a divorcée, owned a home near the railroad depot, made lively by Powell’s cousins, Auntie’s lover, and passing strangers who stopped for meals. Encouraged by her aunt to further her education, Powell begged a scholarship to Lake Erie College for Women. There she wrote and performed in plays and edited the Lake Erie Record, a campus quarterly, which often contained her playful yet pessimistic stories.

In 1918, Powell moved to New York City.

There she worked briefly for the Butterick Company, the U. S. Navy, and the Red Cross while writing freelance articles and stories. She married Joseph Gousha, Jr., a Pennsylvania-born poet turned ad man, and the couple had a son, Jojo. They settled in Greenwich Village. Powell loved her bohemian neighborhood and the Manhattan nightlife she spent alongside friends John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and others from the literary scene. “There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love,” she wrote.

Powell tried her hand at writing plays, particularly when the family felt pinched financially, but she came to consider her primary work the creation of novels.

Powell set her fiction in the small Ohio towns of her youth and later, most successfully, in familiar New York neighborhoods and cafés. Though dogged

by Gousha’s drinking, Jojo’s probable autism, financial strain, and her own struggles with alcohol, illness, and depression, Dawn Powell managed to write sixteen novels, nine plays, and numerous short stories and reviews. She died in 1965.

by Tim Page, Library of America

By Dawn Powell A World Premiere Per mit No. 7528

311 W. 43rd Street Suite #307 New York, NY 10036 www.minttheater.org

New Yor k, NY

PAID U.S. POSTAGE NON-PROFIT ORG.