FURTHER READINGS A READING SERIES THAT FURTHER EXPLORES THE WORK OF OUR FAVORITE PLAYWRIGHTS.
Waters of the Moon by N.C. Hunter
Featuring an introduction by Charles Duff, author of The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre By N.C. Hunter Directed By Austin Pendleton July 22 through September 24 at The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row (410 W 42nd) Reserve your FPC Tickets now! FPC Hotline: (212) 315-0231
SUNDAY, AUGUST 14 before & after the matinee: A DAY WITH CHARLES DUFF Have tickets to another performance? You’re welcome to join us for brunch! (Brunch only for $35) 12:30pm – Brunch and discussion at West Bank Cafe: Join Charles Duff for a delicious pre-matinee brunch at West Bank Cafe, where he will provide an introduction to A Day by the Sea and share his own personal memories of working with N.C Hunter on the author’s The Adventures of Tom Random. 2:30pm – Matinee performance of A Day by the Sea at Theatre Row. 5:00pm – Continue the conversation at the Theatre Row Lounge: Join Charles Duff, Jonathan Bank, and select members of the company for a post-show wine and cheese reception at the Theatre Row Lounge. Brunch, one matinee ticket, and post-show reception: $75 for members of the First-Priority Club. Call 212.315.0231 to reserve your place.
Monday, August 15th at 7pm The Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row Spring Raffle FREE for members of our First Priority Club For reservations call 212.315.0231 “It fills the heart with laughter and strengthens the spirit.” Harold Hobson, Sunday Times, 1951 N.C. Hunter’s gently comic Waters of the Moon is a touching and skillful examination of class, culture, and disillusionment in post-WWII England. The play centers on the lonely inhabitants of a secluded hotel who live out their days in genteel poverty. When a winter storm brings the arrival of the glamorous and outspoken Helen Lancaster, whose car and family have become snowbound on the way to a New Year’s Eve party, the hotel’s residents are forced to confront their resigned and isolated lives. Waters of the Moon was Hunter’s biggest hit, establishing his reputation as one of England’s leading commercial playwrights of the 1950s. The play opened at the Haymarket Theatre on the West End as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, in a lavish production that starred Wendy Hiller, Dame Sybil Thorndike, and Dame Edith Evans. The production continued to run for a smashing 835 performances, causing New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson “to look with envy on a theatre center like London that can keep such a mild, though intelligent, play with such an extravagant cast continuously on the boards for two years.” In 1977, the play was successfully revived for the Chichester Festival Theatre with Ingrid Bergman in the role of Helen Lancaster. In a review for the Times titled “An Unjust Neglect,” Irving Wardle applauded the play for its “fine workmanship, hard comic edge, and capacity for doing humane justice to ten characters within the confines of a well-articulated plot.” Mint Theater Company is pleased to present Waters of the Moon in a one-night Further Reading on August 15th. The evening will feature an introduction by guest speaker Charles Duff, who began his career in 1967 as an actor in N.C. Hunter’s The Adventures of Tom Random, and later went on to write about the original production of Waters of the Moon in his book, The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre.
SPOTLIGHT ON MARTHA HALLY
Special Feature
COSTUME DESIGNER FOR MINT’S A DAY BY THE SEA by Mint Associate Director Jesse Marchese
Martha Hally had a much different vision of her future when she first enrolled in the
Theater Department at Tufts University back in 1970. “I went to college thinking I would become the next Julie Andrews,” she remembers with wry amusement. It was an acting teacher who first pointed her in a different direction. “He was very sweet, but he suggested that I needed to find something else to do with my life.” At first, Martha was devastated—but then the university’s costume designer offered her a position as dresser on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I signed up and went backstage, and I’ve never left. I just realized that that’s where I belonged.” Martha went on to receive an MFA in Costume Design from Carnegie Mellon, and has since designed countless professional productions, both regionally and Off-Broadway. “I love being behind the scenes,” she explains. “As a designer, I love being part of the first conversation about the play—that initial conceptual conversation with the director.”
Martha Hally (center) at this year’s Lucille Lortel Awards. Martha was nominated for Best Costume Design for Mint’s Women Without Men.
For the Mint, Martha has designed ten plays, beginning with The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd in 2009. When asked what she likes about working with the company, Martha replies without hesitation. “The plays! Every time, I am so blown away by how contemporary they are. You can reach in there and pull out two or three things that are completely relevant. It’s astonishing.” Included on her resume are some of our largest and most challenging productions. For A Little Journey in 2011, Martha designed nearly 40 outfits for the play’s 15 different characters. Her show-stopping costumes for our 2015 production of Fashions for Men—which featured 12 actors playing 20 different characters—garnered rave reviews and resulted in a New York Times feature article.
“That doesn’t scare me,” says Martha of our large cast productions. “I did the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade once and after you’ve dressed 10,000 people in one morning nothing really phases you.” Most recently, Martha was part of our all-female design team for Hazel Ellis’ Women Without Men. Her work on that production garnered Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Costume Design. “The award nominations were a great surprise. Costume designers usually get nominated for big splashy things, but I felt like it was a quiet design—so I was thrilled to be recognized for it.” ...continued next page
Special Feature Cont’d continued... The plays that require “quiet” designs are often the ones that excite Martha most. “I really feel like my job is to service the characters and the storytelling of the play, but also to get out of the way. In many ways you shouldn’t remember the clothing, especially in these kinds of plays. The vocabulary of a Mint play is often so much more delicate and subtle.” It’s a vocabulary that particularly exists in A Day by the Sea—N.C. Hunter’s moving depiction of one man’s personal crisis in postWWII England. In designing our upcoming production, Martha began by thinking about the play’s color palette. “We’re creating this world—Laura Anson’s world of her garden and her estate, which she’s clinging on to—and into that world comes Julian who is completely at odds with it. I felt it important to make that clear. Laura’s color palette is very soft—sun-bleached with the colors of her garden—and then Julian enters in his gray, three-piece, bureaucrat suit. That was sort of the thrust of the design for me.” Notably, A Day by the Sea reunites Martha with director Austin Pendleton and actor George Morfogen, both of whom were involved in her very first professional production in 1977— Arthur Miller’s After the Fall at Williamstown Theater Festival. “I’m sort of hoping this is not a sign that I’ve gone full circle and that this is going to be my last professional gig,” says Martha with a laugh.
Enter and
Win
Win a one-of-a-kind treasure: An autographed copy of A Day by the Sea, signed by John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Irene Worth and the rest of the original West End cast.
Enter our raffle to win a hardcover, first edition publication of A Day by the Sea by N.C. Hunter, illustrated with gorgeous black-and-white production photos and autographed by the star-studded original West End cast. Take home this rare token of theatrical history signed by British theatrical royalty, including Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, and Irene Worth.
That—however—is an unnecessary apprehension. A designer of keen insight, enormous creativity, and remarkable sensitivity, Ms. Hally is destined to be in demand for years to come. New Theater - New Seating!
To buy raffle tickets, go to: minttheater.org/make-an-investmint and click on the “A DAY BY THE SEA Raffle” tab or call: (212) 315-0231 Tickets are $5 each, or 5 for $20. Martha Hally’s costume design renderings for Mint’s upcoming production of A Day by the Sea.
(To purchase 5 for $20, simply select and purchase 4 tickets and we’ll throw in an extra one for free!) The winner will be drawn and notified on September 25, 2016.
Dear Friends, I hope you are enjoying your summer! It’s a busy time at the Mint—the cast of A Day by the Sea is in rehearsal, and as I write this (Monday, July 11) the crew is unloading our set off a truck at Theatre Row, getting ready for performances to begin on July 22nd. We have a few special events planned for the summer, including a reading of Waters of the Moon, another great play by N.C. Hunter. Our reading will be directed by Mint Associate Director Jesse Marchese and will be introduced by special guest Charles Duff, who is coming over from England to help us celebrate and appreciate the work of Hunter. Duff is the author The Lost Summer, subtitled The Heyday of the West End Theatre. Duff’s book is, in part, a biography of Frith Banbury, based on extensive interviews with Banbury, who directed Waters of the Moon. Also inside this edition of the First Priority Club newsletter, we’ll introduce you to our costume designer, Martha Hally. Martha has designed many Mint shows over the last ten years and last spring, she was honored with Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominations for her work on Woman Without Men. I look forward to seeing you at Theatre Row this summer, for one or both of our N.C. Hunter plays! Happy summer!
FIRST PRIORITY CLUB NEWS A Day by the Sea by N.C. Hunter Directed by Austin Pendleton July 22 - September 24 The Beckett Theatre, Theatre Row 410 W. 42nd Street Waters of the Moon by N.C. Hunter A Further Reading Series Event Monday, August 15 - 7pm The Beckett Theatre Reserve your FPC Tickets now! FPC Hotline: (212) 315-0231
Jonathan
from your friends at Mint Theater
Summer Greetings! www.minttheater.org (212) 315-0231 330 West 42nd Street, Suite # 1210 New York, NY 10036