What the Public Wants flyer

Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday at 7pm

by mail or in person 311 West 43rd Street, #307, NY 10036 by phone (212) 315-0231 ($2.50 service charge applies) by fax (212) 977-5211 online minttheater.org

Friday & Saturday at 8pm Saturday & Sunday at 2pm

BOX OFFICE 12-6 Monday through Friday.

Weekend Hours 10-6 Saturday, 11-3 Sunday

No service charge for online orders!

All tickets are held at the Box Office.

CHEAP TIX You don’t have to be a cheapskate to appreciate a bargain, especially these days.

Mint Theater Company is now offering a LIMITED NUMBER of seats at HALF-PRICE ($27.50) for EVERY PERFORMANCE. If you need to know where you’ll be sitting, this isn’t for you: “You pays your money and you takes your chances”. You won’t find a deeper discount anywhere, so order them now while you still can. Cheap Tix may be ordered in advance, but once they’re gone, they’re gone.

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DATE

COMING NEXT

Monday, April 11th, 2011 Mint Theater Company’s Annual Benefit

A Little Journey

by Rachel Crothers Directed by Jackson Gay May 5th - July 3rd, 2011

Ten strangers on a train take the journey of their lives in the Mint’s next play, A LITTLE JOURNEY by Rachel Crothers (author of SUSAN AND GOD). This heartfelt human comedy, one of Crothers’ best, was nominated for the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1918.

In the play, a routine train trip proves anything but ordinary for an eccentric mix of passengers. Among them are Julie, a disillusioned young woman down on her luck, and Jim, a lonely rancher who’s survived his own troubled life sojourn. Jim falls in love, but Julie sinks deeper into despair… until a dangerous detour gives them an unexpected chance at happiness.

PAID

artistic director JONATHAN BANK

general manager SHERRI KOTIMSKY

BY ARNOLD BENNETT

TO PURCHASE TICKETS:

New York, NY Permit No. 7528

PERFORMANCES

NON - PROFIT U . S . POSTAGE

at the Mint Theater (311 West 43rd Street, third floor)

“I’m told I pander to the passions of the public. Call it that if you like. It’s what everybody is trying to do. Only I succeed. Mind you, I don’t call it that. I call it supplying a legitimate demand.”

JANUARY 13TH THROUGH MARCH 13T H

DIRECTED BY

MATTHEW ARBOUR

(212) 315-0231 www.minttheater.org

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

Get on board for what the New York Herald called “a big adventure of the soul”…performances start May 5, 2011.

WITH ELLEN ADAIR MARY BAIRD ROB BRECKENRIDGE BIRGIT HUPPUCH LAURIE KENNEDY JEREMY LAWRENCE DOUGLAS REES MARC VIETOR

JANUARY 13th THRU MARCH 13th

SETS ROGER HANNA COSTUMES ERIN MURPHY LIGHTS MARCUS DOSHI SOUND DANIEL KLUGER STAGE MANAGER KATHY SNYDER ASST. STAGE MANAGER LAUREN MCARTHUR GRAPHICS JUDE DVORAK ILLUSTRATION STEFANO IMBERT PRESS REPRESENTATIVE DAVID GERSTEN & ASSOCIATES CASTING STUART HOWARD, AMY SCHECTER & PAUL HARDT

novels would be set there, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910), and The Card (1911).

Bennett branched out into playwriting with Cupid and Commonsense (1908).

His second play, What the Public Wants (1909), transferred to the West End. For the next two decades, Bennett’s plays would be a fixture in London and New York. Some, such as the multigenerational saga Milestones (1912) were based on his novels. Others were completely new inventions, such as Don Juan de Marana (1923), Bennett’s fantasia on the Don Juan myth. In 1913, at the peak of his theatrical fame, Bennett’s plays had 2,700 performances across the world.

THE TIMES (LONDON)

“A masterpiece in Bennettʼs own precisely ironic manner” JOHN DRINKWATER, The Manchester Guardian, 1923

What the Public Wants is a sly satire on tabloid journalism by Arnold Bennett.

A lively look at life behind the headlines and proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

This 1909 comedy charts the efforts of media mogul Sir Charles Worgan to boost circulation as well as own social standing. Sir Charles is loosely based on Lord Northcliffe, founder of Britain’s leading tabloid, The Daily Mail and, like Hearst and Pulitzer, a legendary “media baron” from the golden age of newspapers. Sir Charles claims to have “revolutionized journalism.” He owns forty different publications, employs over a thousand people and is worth millions—and yet he wants more—he wants respect: “I’m just as good as they are, and I don’t like their attitude!”

Sir Charles wants respect from the “superior people” who look down their noses at him. But is he willing to pay the price?

“One of the best comedies of our time,” wrote Max Beerbohm of the play’s London premiere. “No one but Bernard Shaw sends up ideas as

skyrockets more successfully than Mr. Bennett,” wrote the Chicago Evening Post of the play’s American debut in 1913.

What the Public Wants was first produced by The Stage Society in London in March 1909. “A brilliantly illuminating satire,” declared The London Times, and the play promptly transferred to the West End where it was hailed as “a very amusing and often very witty farce.” It was first seen in the U.S. in 1913, when the Manchester Repertory Company toured Boston and Chicago. The Boston Globe described the play as a “delightfully clever satire, often of scintillating brilliancy, thoroughly interesting and constantly entertaining,” while the Chicago Tribune praised it as “luminous and watchful, a gem.” In 1922, the Theatre Guild produced the New York premiere.

Bennett’s prescient comedy has been revived numerous times in England; each time critics have commented on how the play never shows its age. “The thing that impresses one most about What the Public Wants is its curious up-to-dateness… Indeed, its purpose is all the more urgent now, since the ills of the Press, which the play diagnoses so well, have grown alarmingly, especially in the last few years,” wrote The Stage.

“The satire is as topical, the wit as keen, and the humor as penetrating.”

100 years after it was written, Bennett’s savage wit still hits the target.

ARNOLD BENNETT (1867-1931)

In his lifetime, Arnold Bennett ranked among the most influential and prolific authors in the world. His work spanned nearly every category: novels, plays, screenplays, short stories, essays, travelogues, war dispatches, reviews, pocket philosophies, and howto books. His novels were perennial best-sellers; his plays ran for hundreds of performances and his weekly book review was so powerful that it could make or break an author’s reputation.

Bennett was a bona fide celebrity. He reveled in the trappings of success (he was notoriously fond of his yacht) although his origins were modest.

He was born in Hanley, one of the six towns of the Potteries, the bleak northern region home to the British ceramics industry.

At 21, he moved to London. He began his literary career as a journalist, editing the weekly periodical Woman and contributing to various magazines.

His first novel, A Man from the North (1898), drew on his memories of the Potteries, which he re-named “Five Towns.” Nearly all of Bennett’s major

Bennett’s prodigious output never slowed. In the last year of his life, he wryly scribbled in his journal: “Total of words for the year, 352,250. Not bad.”

Bennett was a literary lion, but the rising generation of Modernists, particularly Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, dismissed his straightforward realism.

Still, as he lay dying from typhoid in 1931, Bennett was so revered that the streets outside his window were covered in straw to mute the noise of traffic—the last time this old London custom, usually reserved for royalty, would be observed.

1909

Sir Charles Worgan:

Iʼve only got one principle. Give the public what it wants.

2009

Rupert Murdoch:

Media companies need to give people the news they want.

ENRICHMINT EVENTS

EnrichMINT Events are supported in part by a grant from The New York Council for the Humanities and 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, January 15th Edward Mendelson, Columbia University

Sunday, January 23rd Wendy Lesser, Editor, The Threepenny Review

ARNOLD BENNETT: A NOVELIST IN THE THEATER

WHO’S AFRAID OF ARNOLD BENNETT?

Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is Auden’s literary executor; his book Later Auden (1999) is a sequel to his Early Auden (1981).

His book The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life was published by Pantheon in 2006. He has prepared editions of novels by Hardy, Bennett, Meredith, Wells, and Trollope.

The publication of Virginia Woolf’s 1924 essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” did much to malign Arnold Bennett’s literary reputation. A rallying cry to Modernism, the essay criticizes Bennett for placing too much emphasis on realistic detail and not enough on emotional truth. Author and editor Wendy Lesser takes issue with Woolf and discusses what she admires in Bennett’s work.

Sunday, January 16th Andie Tucher, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS: SENSATION OR SPINACH? Should journalism give the public what it wants – or what it needs? Is there a middle ground?

Journalist and historian Andie Tucher explores the perennial delights and dangers of the sensational press in the U.S. and Britain and places Sir Charles Worgan in context with his realworld counterparts.

Andie Tucher wrote Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and The Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium. She is an associate professor and directs the Communications PhD program at the Columbia Journalism School.

Saturday, January 22nd Martin Meisel, Columbia University

BENNETT ON BELONGING: PROFESSIONS, COMMUNITY, “THE PUBLIC” AND THE PLAY Martin Meisel is Brander Matthews Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of How Plays Work and Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater.

Wendy Lesser is editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of eight nonfiction books and one novel. Her most recent book, Silenced Voices, Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2011. Winner of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and numerous other organizations, she has written book, theater, film, dance and music criticism for a variety of publications. She divides her time between Berkeley and New York.

Sunday, January 30th Steve Lipman, The Jewish Week

A JOURNALIST’S RESPONSE TO WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS Veteran reporter and editor Steve Lipman shares his response to Bennett’s portrayal of the journalistic world. Lipman has been a staff writer at the Jewish Week since 1983 and was editor of the Buffalo Jewish Review from 1975 to 1983.

Thursday, February 3 Alan Andrews

ARNOLD BENNETT: A NOVELIST AMONG PLAYWRIGHTS

Bennett considered himself a novelist first and a playwright second—and it was only success as a novelist that inspired him to write for the theater. Professor Alan Andrews discusses how Bennett’s skills as a novelist informed his dramatic work, and how fame in one genre shaped and challenged his career in the second.

Professor Alan Andrews is emeritus Professor of Theatre at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. He has often written and lectured about the theatre of Bernard Shaw and his era.

He wrote the Introduction to the Mint Theater’s St. John Hankin Reclaimed.

Sunday, February 6 Robert Squillace, New York University

ARNOLD BENNETT AND MODERNISM Professor Robert Squillace discusses Bennett in the context of Modernism, the literar y movement that misunderstood and mischaracterized his greatest work.

Robert Squillace is the author of Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett and Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature. He is Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs at New York University.

Saturday, February 12 J. Ellen Gainor, Cornell University

ARNOLD BENNETT AND THE EDWARDIAN THEATRE J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre and a specialist in British and American drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and women’s dramaturgy. She is the author of the award-winning studies Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender and Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture and Politics 1915-48.

Most recently, she co-authored The Norton Anthology of Drama.