First Priority Club - October 2018

A sneak peek of the art...

THE PRICE OF THOMAS SCOTT

BY ELIZABETH BAKER DIRECTED BY JONATHAN BANK JANUARY 24 THROUGH MARCH 23

The Price of Thomas Scott

by Elizabeth Baker Directed by Jonathan Bank The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd Street) January 24 through March 23 Tue - Sat 7:30PM Sat & Sun 2:00PM Wed 2:00PM: 2/6, 2/13, & 3/20 No performance: 2/5

First Priority Club Holiday Party & Reclaimed Reading December 3, 2018

7:00pm The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd Street)

The Price of Thomas Scott is a “delightful piece of realistic drama”, which tells the story of Mr. Scott and his family. Thomas Scott is a pillar of his church, a devoted husband, loving father—and the owner of a declining business that can barely support the family.

Scott’s chief asset is the location of his shop, a prime corner in West London. When Scott receives a handsome offer for the shop, he has a chance to support the ambitions of his children and retire comfortably. But the buyer wants to put a dance hall on the spot and Scott doesn’t believe in dancing. Will Thomas Scott open his mind for the good of his family, or is the price too high?

- Meet Miss Baker The Price of Thomas Scott will launch our most ambitious undertaking since the inauguration of our Teresa Deevy Project in 2010. “Meet Miss Baker” will bring attention to this long forgotten author who was once “one of the most widely discussed playwrights in England.” (The Christian Science Monitor) Baker burst onto the dramatic scene in London in 1909, when her play Chains premiered, “a remarkable play,” the Times declared, “—all the more remarkable if, as we believe, it is the first attempt its author has written.” Chains was frequently produced around England in the years that followed but has still never had a professional production in New York (outside of a failed Americanized adaptation in 1913). And not one of Baker’s other dozen or so plays ever received the attention or success it deserved.

“Meet Miss Baker” will begin the process of correcting that, first with The Price of Thomas Scott followed in 2020 by overlapping productions of two Baker plays at two theaters within Theater Row. Our Theatre Row twin bill will pair Baker’s surprising comedy Partnership, about an ambitious professional woman who receives a tempting business proposition—with Chains, Baker’s debut and claim to fame.

Call the FPC Hotline at: 212.315.0231

Early 1900s storefronts

Elizabeth Baker

By Maya Cantu

Catapulting from office typist to “one of the most widely discussed playwrights in England” (The Christian Science Monitor), Elizabeth Baker startled her contemporaries with the realist landmark Chains (1909). In this and the twelve produced plays that followed, Baker focused extraordinary attention on the lives of London’s clerks, shopgirls, and suburban strivers. Drawn in her life and work to themes of wanderlust, Baker wrote plays that incisively explore the constraints of class, gender, and social convention upon individual agency, while centralizing the ambitions and desires of working women.

Born to a family of drapers in Paddington, London on August 20, 1876, Baker (whose birth name was Gertrude) grew up amid a large step-family in the suburbs of west London. In 1883, Baker’s widowed mother, Elizabeth Reavell, remarried master draper George Robert Collett—and assumed an enterprising new role running her second husband’s business. At the age of fourteen, Baker worked as an assistant in her parents’ shop, while writing “little things” and short plays in her spare time. Soon after, she found employment as a London shorthand clerk and typist, later working in the offices of The Spectator.

Characterized in the press as an untrained “girl-novice,” the thirty-two-year old Baker created a theatrical sensation with her first full-length play, Chains. First presented by the Play Actors in 1909, and then by Charles Frohman at the Duke of York’s Theatre, Chains focused on lower-middle-class characters longing to break away from routines of work and marriage, with clerk Charley Wilson looking to new horizons in Australia. Baker earned praise for her “keenness of observation, her powers of drawing characters from the life, and her gift of writing dialogue that is natural and unforced” (The Field). The Bystander called Chains “one of the greatest plays that has been produced in this country for many a long day.” Baker, meanwhile, continued in her work as a typist.

Baker followed Chains with a versatile range of challenging and original plays that premiered on the stages of England’s repertory theaters, as well as in the West End. These included Edith (1912), a one-act feminist comedy for the Women Writer’s Suffrage League; the comic drama The Price of Thomas Scott (1913, Gaiety Theatre, Manchester); and her scintillating business-world comedy Partnership (1917, Court Theatre). Long independent, Baker also found mid-life romance with James Edmund Allaway, a widower who worked in the upholstery trade; she married him in 1915, at the age of forty. In 1922—echoing themes in Chains—the pair emigrated for two years to the Cook Islands; and at Australia’s Sydney Repertory Society, Baker premiered an early version of her controversial satire Bert’s Girl (produced in 1927 at the Court Theatre).

Despite receiving glowing reviews for the tragicomic Penelope Forgives (1930), Baker faced declining production prospects in the early 1930s. Her career as a professional playwright apparently concluded with the one-act One of the Spicers (1932). Following the death of her husband in 1941, Baker moved from her longtime family home in Bedford Park to Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, where she lived with a stepsister. Four ITV Television Playhouse adaptations of her plays appeared between 1959 and 1961. These broadcasts brought “Mrs. Gertrude Allaway, an eighty-four year old widow” (The Daily Mirror) a small measure of renewed recognition, half a century after The Guardian described Elizabeth Baker as a “widener of frontiers.” She died in Hertfordshire on March 8, 1962.

THE PRICE OF THOMAS SCOTT

By Elizabeth Baker

January 24 - March 23 Tue - Sat 7:30PM, Sat & Sun 2:00PM No performance: Tue 2/5 at 7:30pm Added Matinees: Wed 2/6, 2/13 & 3/20 at 2:00pm

Call 212.315.0231 to buy your tickets today!

YOU’RE INVITED...

Mint’s First Annual First Priority Club Holiday Party: Featuring a Reclaimed Reading Monday, December 3 7:00PM in the Clurman Theatre Cost: Free! It’s a party!

For more information or to reserve your place, call 212.315.0231.

Our Reclaimed series launched in 2005, each featuring a single author. Our most recent Reclaimed books are the two Teresa Deevy Volumes—but there are three volumes featuring six great plays that you may have missed (or forgotten?) Plays by Arthur Schnitzler, St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, all produced by the Mint ten years ago or more.

Please join me and some of my favorite actors on December 3rd, for a reading of scenes from these plays. We’ll introduce you to some terrific Mint plays from the past...or remind you of some wonderful Mint nights you enjoyed back on 43rd St. Afterwards, there will be a festive reception with the actors—giving us all a chance to thank you for your support!

I look forward to seeing you on December 3rd!

Jonathan

HOW DID YOU FIND IT?

(or How Miles Malleson led me to Elizabeth Baker) How did you find it?

The question I’m asked most often—and the one I’m least able answer. Most of the time I just can’t remember. One thing leads to another. But who can remembering the stops along the way? Nowadays, with our every move online being tracked and recorded, that’s no longer a problem. Using a tool called History Trends Unlimited, I decided to see if I could find the breadcrumbs that led me to The Price of Thomas Scott.

First thing I did was to find the date when I discover the title (June 27th, 2018) and then I worked backwards, reviewing my searches leading up to that moment.

330 West 42nd Street Suite 1210 New York, NY 10036

1:01:22 PM

www.minttheater.org 212.315.0231

1:04:18 PM 1:07:02 PM 1:08:30 PM

I decide to look (again) at the NY public library holdings for Miles Malleson. (Maybe it was reading all those great reviews for Conflict?)

Directly under Yours Unfaithfully in the catalog was a listing for Scrapped

by Alma Brosnan. This play was “revised” by Malleson. Curious.

Now I’m in the Times (U.K.) archives reading a review of Scrapped (worth reading?)

Searching Google now for Alma Brosnan and Scrapped and finding a Google Books link, see below.

West End Women: Women and the London Stage, 1918-1962. The link I click takes me directly to a page in the appendix; a listing of every play written by a woman produced on the West End, by date. What a gold mine!

At the top of the page is Bert’s Girl by Elizabeth Baker, produced in 1927, the same year as Scrapped. I recognized Baker’s name.

Eighteen years ago, Mint produced two plays by Edwardian women. Diana of Dobson’s by Cicely Hamilton, and Rutherford and Son by Githa Sowerby (first in September 2001 and again in 2011). I later learned that both plays were published in a 1991 anthology called New Women Plays, which included Chains by Elizabeth Baker. I remember wondering what else Baker had written, but I never did anything to find out. Seeing a 1927 credit for her caught my eye. I knew Chains dated back to 1910 or so and I was interested to see she was still working, 17 years later.

1:14:50 PM

1:43:30 PM 4:37:36 PM 4:38:41 PM

Another Alma Brosnan search leads me to another Google Book, this one Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies.

This book includes a chapter on Brosnan and two other women playwrights, all members of the Independent Labor Party Arts Guild.

Malleson was involved with this group too. The chapter lists some other women playwrights performed by the Guild, including Elizabeth Baker’s The Price of Thomas Scott. Intriguing title—obviously Thomas Scott has an ethical problem to ponder.

After 30 minutes of answering emails and attending to other things, I download the play from one of my favorite sites: archive.org After attending to other things for a few hours, I return to Thomas Scott.

First, I read more about Baker in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

I find a review of the first production of The Price of Thomas Scott in the Guardian which confirms my suspicion: the play addresses “certain important problems, such as…whether it is wrong for a man who has scruples about the morality of dancing to sell his shop to the owners of public dancing halls…” I think about a certain cake shop in Colorado and look forward to reading the play!

Happy Fall!

from your friends at Mint Theater

FIRST PRIORITY CLUB NEWS Coming Soon!

The Price of Thomas Scott

by Elizabeth Baker Directed by Jonathan Bank The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd Street) January 24 through March 23 Tue - Sat 7:30PM Sat & Sun 2:00PM Wed 2:00PM: 2/6, 2/13, & 3/20 No performance: Tue 2/5, 7:30pm FPC Holiday Party & Reclaimed Reading: Monday, December 3, 7:00PM The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd Street)

Call 212.315.0231 to purchase tickets today!