Fatal Weakness Flyer

New York, NY Pe r m i t N o . 7 5 2 8

AT THE MINT THEATER, 311 WEST 43RD ST, 3RD FLOOR

pa i d

AUGUST 19 THROUGH OCTOBER 12

non - profit u . s . postage

866-811-4111 OR minttheater.org

PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

J O N AT H A N B A N K

AUGUST 19 -THROUGH OCTOBER 12

SPECIAL DISCOUNT OFFER!

SAVE 10% AUGUST 19 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 7 PAY ONLY $49.50 (use code MINT49) (REGULAR PRICE $55; $2.75 PER TICKET SERVICE CHARGE APPLIES TO ALL ORDERS.)

PERFORMANCES Tue, Wed & Thu at 7pm Fri & Sat at 8pm, Sat & Sun at 2pm Wed. Matinee: 9/10 at 2pm No performances: 9/9, 9/16

ORDER YOUR TICKETS TODAY! Online: minttheater.org Phone: 866.811.4111 M-F 9 to 9, S-S 10 to 6

SAVE EVEN MORE WITH CHEAPTIX:

WITH -

CLIFF BEMIS CYNTHIA DARLOW KRISTIN GRIFFITH SEAN PATRICK HOPKINS PATRICIA KILGARRIFF VICTORIA MACK

You don’t have to be a cheapskate to appreciate a bargain. We offer a limited number of half-price tickets ($27.50) for every performance.

How many CheapTix are available?

About 10 per night, sometimes less—and once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Do I get to choose where I sit?

No. We assign your seats the night of the performance, but don’t worry, our theater only has 100-seats.

Will I sit with my friends? Yes, we won’t ever split your party.

By

GEORGE KELLY Directed

by JESSE MARCHESE

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First-Priority Club Members pay only $38.50 per ticket. You save 30%.

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

First-Priority Club members receive advance notification of all of our productions and events. Our newsletter is packed with information and insight.

Sets VICKI R. DAVIS Costumes ANDREA VARGA Lights CHRISTIAN DEANGELIS Original Music & Sound JANE SHAW Props JOSHUA YOCOM Casting JUDY BOWMAN Production Stage Manager RHONDA PICOU Assistant Stage Manager ARTHUR ATKINSON Illustration STEFANO IMBERT Graphics HEY JUDE DESIGN, INC. Advertising THE PEKOE GROUP Press DAVID GERSTEN & ASSOCIATES

866-811-4111 OR minttheater.org THIS PRODUCTION IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY: The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

THE FATAL WEAKNESS, George Kelly’s last produced play, is a smart comedy about romance, marriage and commitment. It opened in New York on November 19, 1946 in a production by the legendary Theatre Guild starring Ina Claire. Although Claire’s triumphant return to Broadway after a five year absence garnered much of the press attention, Kelly’s play turned more than a few critics’ heads.

GEORGE FREEDLY , N.Y. Morning Telegraph “One of Kelly’s best. It reveals keen understanding of character—an evening of genuine quality.” wrote Ward Morehouse in The New York Sun. Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Post called THE FATAL WEAKNESS “so fresh in its observations, three-dimensional in its characters and human in its humor that it emerges as the first important new comedy of the season.” The play went on to be hailed “Best New Comedy” by George Jean Nathan’s Honor List in Theatre Book of the Year, 1946-1947.

But Kelly’s comedy was too dramatic for some critics. The Times’ Brooks Atkinson could not reconcile the play’s sober themes with its shrewd sense of humor. “He has remarkable facility for writing comic lines, [but] he has not decided whether he is writing capricious comedy or psychological drama,” Atkinson complained—accusing him of “playing both sides of the street.”

Meanwhile, The Nation’s Joseph Wood Krutch recognized that this duality was the play’s greatest strength. “Neither the action nor the author’s commentary ever falls into any of the familiar grooves one is perpetually expecting it to find. Mr. Kelly rejects all the ready-made patterns which would immediately render his play comfortably classifiable and thus defeats all the easy expectations.” John Chapman of the New York Daily News agreed with Krutch, calling THE FATAL WEAKNESS, “an evening of intelligent, smooth fun. It is a kind of fun that goes deeper than laughter, for any exposure of human frailty is not without its sobering side.”

In 1976, THE FATAL WEAKNESS was revived as a vehicle for Academy-Award winner, Eva Marie Saint, who said the role of Mrs. Espenshade was one of her all-time favorites. The play was filmed for PBS’ Hollywood Television Theater that year, and featured an interview with Princess Grace Kelly, who discussed her uncle’s work.

In a critical biography of playwright George Kelly, author Foster Hirsch calls THE FATAL WEAKNESS “a lovely and gracious swan song…a delight for those attuned to the Kelly pace and tone. This play is the most urbane and gracious achievement of a singular playwright.”

george kelly Admired for his character-driven satires and gimlet-eyed plays of modern manners, George Kelly (1887-1974) led a distinguished career in the New York theatre from the 1910s through the 1940s.

George Edward Kelly was born in Schuylkill Falls, Pennsylvania, the seventh child of a remarkable Irish-American family known as the “Philadelphia Kellys.” Starting out as an actor and writer for vaudeville one-acts, Kelly rose to the height of acclaim in the early 1920s, with plays that he both wrote and directed. Kelly followed his breakout 1922 theatrical satire The Torch Bearers with 1924’s The Show-Off (which Heywood Broun called “the best comedy which has yet been written by an American”), as well as his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1925 psychological drama Craig’s Wife.

Although Kelly’s commercial success declined steeply in the 1930s and 1940s, he produced some of his most striking and unconventional plays during these decades, including Philip Goes Forth (1931) and his two satiric dramas of marital infidelity: The Deep Mrs. Sykes (1945) and The Fatal Weakness (1946). Out of sync with sentimental postwar sensibilities, Kelly continued to write a number of unproduced plays as he shifted into semi-retirement with his longtime partner, William E. Weagly.

In recent years, George Kelly has made an emphatic re-entrance upon New York and regional stages, while his “sharply insightful” (The New York Sun) plays of middle-class domestic life have also invited critical rediscovery. Once “allowed to pass unremarked” (as Mary McCarthy noted in a 1947 essay) as a significant American playwright, Kelly returns to delight, provoke and surprise new audiences.

enrichMINT events ENRICHMINT EVENTS ARE SUPPORTED IN PART

BY A GRANT FROM 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.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 23 after the matinee: KRISTIN CELELLO

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, CUNY QUEENS COLLEGE Professor Celello studies the history of marriage and divorce in the twentieth-century United States, as well as single parenting in U.S. history. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Virginia in 2004. In 2006, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Emory University Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life. She is the author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States and is currently co-editing a volume titled Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage Crisis. Professor Celello will discuss the play’s portrayal of marital discord from this unique historical perspective.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 after the matinee: MAYA CANTU

THEATER HISTORIAN AND DRAMATURG

Maya Cantu is a theater historian, scholar and dramaturg devoted to the revitalization of forgotten classics.

She recently completed her Doctor of Fine Arts degree at Yale School of Drama, where she received her MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism in 2010. Her research focuses on Broadway plays and musicals of the modernist era. Maya is Mint Theater’s Dramaturgical Advisor. She will discuss the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright George Kelly.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31 after the matinee: KEN BLOOM

the Mint, it seemed likely that “Philip Goes Forth,” directed by Jerry Ruiz, would be worth seeing—and sure enough, it’s a gem, mounted with the company’s accustomed skill and resourcefulness.

George Kelly was nothing more than a name to me until four months ago, when Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse produced “The Show-Off,” the 1924 play for which he is remembered—barely—by students of American theater between the wars. I was expecting a modestly interesting historical exhibit. Instead “The Show-Off” turned out to be a serious comedy of unusual force and emotional complexity. It set me to wondering about Kelly’s other plays, no less than nine of which made it to Broadway between 1922 and 1946. Might any of them be as good?

Now the Mint Theater Company, an OffBroadway troupe that specializes in exhuming forgotten shows deserving of a second chance, has answered that question by reviving “Philip Goes Forth,” which was last seen on Broadway in 1931. Given the quality of “The Show-Off” and the track record of

If George Kelly wrote two plays as good as “Philip Goes Forth” and “The ShowOff,” it’s a safe bet that the rest of his oeuvre is worth a closer look.

Bernardo Cubria and Natalie Kuhn

AUTHOR OF BROADWAY: AN ENCYCLOPEDIC GUIDE TO THE HISTORY, PEOPLE, AND PLACES OF TIMES SQUARE Ken Bloom is a New York-based theatre historian, playwright, director, record producer, and author. His book Broadway: An Encyclopedic Guide to the History, People, and Places of Times Square won a prestgious Source Magazine Award and was named one of the top reference books of the year by the New York Times.

In collaboration with Frank Vlastnik, Bloom wrote the bestseller, Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time which was awarded the George Freedley Award. Mr. Bloom will discuss George Kelly and the commercial American theatre of the 1940s—the decade in which THE FATAL WEAKNESS was first produced.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 after the matinee: JOHN M. CLUM PROFESSOR EMERITUS, DUKE UNIVERSITY

Rahav Segev

After 28 years of marriage, Ollie Espenshade is still an incurable romantic (her fatal weakness). Perhaps discovering that her husband is a lying cheat will cure her?

Professor John Clum works in the fields of twentieth century American and British drama and American film with an emphasis on gay male theater and film. He has written multiple books, as well as essays on Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, and Edward Albee for the Cambridge Companions to these authors’ words. His other essays have appeared in Modern Drama, South Atlantic Quarterly and Theater Journal.

His book The Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present —which discusses the historic tradition of gay dramatists writing about heterosexual relationships for the commercial theater—includes a chapter on George Kelly and THE FATAL WEAKNESS.