So Help Me God! by Maurine Dallas Watkins

So Help Me God!

TO OR DE R TICKETS:

Five Weeks Only:

Call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200

at the Lucille Lortel Theater (121 Christopher Street)

or visit www.ticketcentral.com

November 18th through December 20th

starring Kristen Johnston with Brad Bellamy, Catherine Curtin, Amy Fitts, Jeremy Lawrence, Ned Noyes,

Kevin O’Donnell, John G. Preston, Allen Lewis Rickman, Kraig Swartz, Peter Van Wagner, Matthew Waterson, Margot White, John Windsor-Cunningham

and Anna Chlumsky sets Bill Clarke costumes Clint Ramos lights Robert Wierzel sound Jane Shaw properties Deborah Gaouette stage manager Samone B. Weissman asst. stage manager Lauren McArthur

Only $55 per ticket!

Tues, Weds, Thurs at 7pm; Fri & Sat at 8pm; Sat & Sun at 2pm Matinee Wednesday November 25th at 2pm No performance Thanksgiving Nov.26th Added Sunday night performance November 29th at 7pm

November 18th to December 20th at the Lucille Lortel Theater

So Help Me God!

directed by Jonathan Bank

Artistic Director Jonathan Bank General Manager Sherri Kotimsky

by Maur ine Dallas Watkins

dir ected by jonathan ban k star r ing kr isten johnston

SO HELP ME GOD! is the story of Kerry, a young actress from Cincinnati, equal parts ambition and idealism, struggling to remain thus on her road to success on Broadway, 1929. In a New York minute, Kerry lands a supporting part as well as the job of understudy to the great Lily Darnley, the temperamental and tempestuous leading lady.

Apparently chosen because she has neither experience, talent, nor blond hair that might compete with Miss Darnley’s, Kerry nevertheless ends up threatening to steal the show.

Lily is a creation as fascinating and unforgettable as Roxie Hart, the “merry murderess” from CHICAGO, the bestknown work by Maurine Dallas Watkins. Like CHICAGO, SO HELP ME GOD! is a satirical comedy focused on a woman with an insatiable desire for attention and the people and industries that thrive on her success. “Nothing is more amusing than Roxie’s increasingly voracious appetite for the front-page,” writes Brooks Atkinson in his New York Times review of CHICAGO in 1926. But indeed Lily’s desire to be center stage may be even more hilarious.

Caricature above from a Playbill for Show Boat, 1928.

“Why, there should be a line at the stage door to see me –Just waiting for a glimpse, nudging each other; “That’s her – Lily Darnley!” School girls, shop girls, housewives, debutantes—I am what they’d all like to be: I’m beauty, I’m romance, I’m glamour…”

SO HELP ME GOD! was slated to open on Broadway on October 28, 1929 (the title had been changed that fall to AN OLD FASHIONED GIRL.) Starring Helen MacKellar as Lily Darnley and Sylvia Sydney as Kerry, it first played the “Subway Circuit” in Brooklyn and Queens, then a popular option for tryouts. Mysteriously, on October 16, a notice appeared in The New York Times that the play was being “withdrawn for revision” Eight days, later, on October 24, the stock market crashed, escalating to the “Black Tuesday” disaster of October 29. The Great Depression had begun, and any Broadway hopes for SO HELP ME GOD! were gone.

Apparently Watkins stashed the play in a figurative drawer where it remained for 80 years until the literary agent for the Watkins estate brought the play to “the diligent literary bloodhounds at Mint Theater Company,” (Time Out New York).

So Help Me God! 311 W 43rd St, suite 307 New York, NY 10036 www.minttheater.org

at the Lucille Lortel Theater

November 18th

to

December 20th

New York, NY Permit No. 7528

paid

non-profit u.s. postage

So Help Me God!

Maurine Dallas

Watkins

Watkins, 1896-1969, wrote the 1926 play CHICAGO, upon which the musical is based.

Winner of six Tonys and a Best Picture Oscar for 2002 film, the musical CHICAGO would seem a “sure thing” from the start. But its beginnings were very much in doubt. Had Watkins got her way, CHICAGO the musical would not exist at all.

She penned the dark comedy while still a student in George Pierce Baker’s Drama 47 Workshop at Yale, the same workshop that spawned Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice.

CHICAGO’s tale of two “jazz slayers” who become instant celebrities struck a chord with a public newly weaned on sensationalist trials such as the Leopold and Loeb case. Watkins herself had covered Leopold and Loeb while a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Indeed, Watkins’ Tribune experiences provided CHICAGO’s foundation.

Her tongue-incheek features on the “beautiful murderesses” turned media darlings, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner—the stories that won her first Tribune by-line—directly inspired CHICAGO’s cynical charmers Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly.

CHICAGO ran for 172 performances on Broadway. Burns Mantle included it in his annual Best Plays anthology of 1926-1927.

An acclaimed silent film version appeared in 1927. That year, CHICAGO was re-published as the inaugural play in Theatre of Today, a new series showcasing the best in contemporary American drama. Series editor George Jean Nathan wrote that CHICAGO “discloses a talent that will go considerable distance in the drama of the land.”

In her later years, Watkins did her best to

disown CHICAGO. She had become a BornAgain Christian, and paradoxically, obsessed with astrology. She now felt embarrassed by the play, fearing it could be misinterpreted as glamorizing crime. As a result, Watkins actually paid her agent $500 a year not to have CHICAGO produced. When Bob Fosse started to call in the mid-1950s, begging to turn the play into a musical, Watkins repeatedly denied him. It was only after Watkins’ death from cancer in 1969, and her mother’s death in 1970, that the estate was persuaded to sell the rights. CHICAGO: A MUSICAL VAUDEVILLE, with music by Kander and Ebb and direction and choreography by Fosse, premiered in 1975. Its success was overshadowed by A CHORUS LINE, but the 1996 revival thrust CHICAGO back into the spotlight.

Watkins’ neglected legacy is partially her own doing. In her final decades, she not only distanced herself from CHICAGO, she withdrew from the world. If she went out at all, she was heavily veiled. She showed no interest in reviving her plays. Upon her death, she left the bulk of her fortune to endow prizes in classical languages at various universities, reflecting a lifelong obsession with the classics.

It was a sad, quiet end to a vibrant career.

CHICAGO was her first and biggest success, but Watkins began writing plays in college.

She left school and moved to Chicago, hoping to hit the theatrical big time. When this didn’t happen, she applied to the Chicago Tribune. Within days, despite no professional experience, she landed a job on the murder beat. Gutsy and good-looking, her intrepid reporting and sardonic humor made her a star.

Eight months later, the restless Watkins moved east. She enrolled briefly at Radcliffe, beginning a PhD in her beloved classics.

Then, Watkins gave up her PhD and moved to New York, where she began commuting to Baker’s 47 Workshop in New Haven. There, she wrote CHICAGO. It earned a grade of 98%, the highest grade Baker had yet given in his prestigious course.

When CHICAGO bowed on Broadway, directed by George Abbott, Watkins suddenly found herself the toast of the town. Reporters played up the contrast between the play’s hardboiled heroines and its modest author, who’d been born a minister’s daughter. Watkins was prim—she refused to write profanity in her typescripts, leaving a string of “blankety-

blanks” for directors to fill in—but she was hardly a shrinking violet. Her portraits show a laughing, confident woman who stares directly into the camera.

For her next Broadway outing, Watkins adapted REVELRY, Samuel Hopkins Adams’ notorious novel about corruption in the Harding administration. Watkins’ resultant 1927 play, a satire about a pokerplaying, liquor-swilling President was deemed “unpatriotic” and “un-American.”

An injunction was threatened. Producers withdrew it from Philadelphia tryouts.

The subsequent Broadway run lasted only 48 performances.

Despite REVELRY, Watkins was still ranked among America’s most promising playwrights. In 1929, Burns Mantle devoted several pages to Watkins in American Playwrights of Today, notably more than the passing mention given contemporaries Susan Glaspell, Ben Hecht, and S.N. Behrman.

In late 1928 or early1929, Watkins began work on SO HELP ME GOD! which was derailed on its journey to Broadway by the Great Depression. Watkins, who had already moved to Hollywood, then focused on screenwriting. Over the next ten years, she wrote or contributed to at least ten films, writing for the era’s most iconic talents. Watkins is credited with the story for UP THE RIVER (Best Picture nominee, 1930), directed by John Ford and starring Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy.

She contributed to another Best Picture nominee, LIBELED LADY (1937), which starred Jean Harlow, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. She wrote the lively screwball comedies NO MAN OF HER OWN (1932), starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard and I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940), starring William Powell and Myrna Loy once more.

She also worked on HELLO, SISTER!, the illfated 1933 Erich Von Stroheim adaptation of Dawn Powell’s play, WALKING DOWN BROADWAY (premiered by the Mint in 2005).

Watkins worked hard to erase her legacy, but her talent is too great to be ignored.

She may not have had the lasting impact on American drama of her contemporaries, but her sparkling satire and witty screwball comedies represent the apex of the form.

Enr ichMINT Events: Saturday, December 5th, after the matinee

Sacr ed Monsters / Profane Dames: Theater’s Love Affair with Difficult Women From SO HELP ME GOD!’s Lily Darnley created by Maurine Dallas Watkins to her sister-in-Terpsichore-and-temperament Lily Garland of TWENTIETH CENTURY created

by Hecht and MacArthur just five years later and on to Margo Channing, Helen Lawson, Neely O’Hara and even BULLETS OVER BROADWAY’s Helen Sinclair, audiences simply dote on those over-the-top dramatic divas who drive lovers to distraction and directors to drink. What is our fascination with these women behaving badly?

Lily, The Star,

to whom all wagons are hitched beautiful and radiant, with super-vitality and devastating charm. Her face is CATHERINE SHEEHY is Resident Dramaturg of Yale Repertory Theatre and ineffably lovely and innocent, with its wide chair of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama. She dark eyes, piquant nose, petal complexion, teaches seminars in American Stage and Screen Comedy, Restoration and 18thCentury British Comedy, Comic Theory, the Collaborative Process, Models high cheek bones, and the firm straight jawline of Dramaturgy, and Satire. She is also a former associate editor of American that is found in a fighter. She is one the gods Theatre and a former managing editor of Theater magazine. She received her love and keep ageless. doctorate from Yale for her dissertation, If You Care to Blast for It: Excavating the Lost Comic Masterpieces of the American Canon.

Kr isten Johnston, Sunday December 6th, after the matinee

Her Legacy R emember ed: American Women Writing for the Stage in the Early Twentieth Century.

This discussion will examine Maureen Dallas Watkins’ legacy as an American woman playwright in the early twentieth century in the context of such contemporaries as Susan Glaspell, Rachel Crothers, Sophie Treadwell, Edna Ferber, Angelina Grimke and Georgia Douglas Johnson. What made it possible for women to penetrate the male-dominated world of playwriting in America? What did these women bring to American theatre that was original, despite or because of their gender -- and race? How did these playwrights fare in their time? Why is their work forgotten today, and what should we remember?

SUSAN JONAS has extensive experience in theatre as an administrator, dramaturg, producer, director, scholar and educator.

During her decade as Art Analyst with the Theatre Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, she developed numerous field-wide initiatives, including a three-year national study which culminated in “The Report on the Status of Women in Theatre,” co-authored with Suzanne Bennett. She currently teaches at New York University. Dr. Jonas is a graduate of Princeton University and earned her doctorate in Dramaturgy at the Yale School of Drama. She is the co-founder of “50/50 in 2020,” a grassroots advocacy enterprise which has set the goal of parity for women in theatre to be achieved by the 100th anniversary of American suffrage (Visit the Facebook page for more information).

two-time Emmy Award-winner as Sally Solomon in “3rd Rock from the Sun” and star of numerous stage productions including The Women on Broadway and Much Ado about Nothing and The Skin of our Teeth at the Public Theater in Central Park.

Ker ry, A tense little creature with dark eyes and the ability to glow and flame and shiver in ecstasy. These qualities are, however, all latent; she is now only a kid from the sticks, solemnly intent on building success, unconscious of the world except as it touches her dream – an iridescent, gleaming bubble world.

Anna Chlumsky

, child star of My Girl and My Girl 2.

Anna’s New York stage credits include: Unconditional (LAByrinth Theater Company), The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero (DR2), Darwin in Malibu (Bay Street Theatre), The Butcherhouse Chronicles (Summer Play Festival).

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