Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar is an original tale of a daughter-dad adventure in which character is tested, quite literally, if preposterously, during a cross-country road trip. Directed by Sarah Blush, and making its world premiere at A.R.T/New York Theatres, this surreal one-act play packs an emotional punch.
It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.
What does it take to turn an extraordinary Shakespearean tragedy into an extraordinary production? The first step is vision. King Lear, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, reflects the artistic vision and collaborative muscle of a directing triumvirate—Branagh, Lucy Skillbeck, and Rob Ashford. They have reduced the Bard’s three-hour-plus saga to two hours with no intermission and cast current and former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students to bring new energy to a complex story. This series of theatrical risks yields cohesive and riveting theater.
Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
Playwright Lynn Riggs is best remembered for Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) because it was the basis for Oklahoma! (1943). Now his play Sump’n Like Wings is having its New York debut 99 years after it was written. Such resurrection of a forgotten work is the core mission of the Mint Theater, as are the deep research and care that inform its meticulously crafted productions.
An advantageous business offer, with a loveless marriage thrown in: this is one of the would-be “partnerships” around which Elizabeth Baker’s 1917 drama Partnership, a feminist parable and Romantic cri de coeur in the guise of a comedy of manners, revolves. As is so often the case with the plays that the Mint Theater Company rescues from obscurity, the issues are both historically specific and still relevant. Must the demands of business always be at odds with personal nourishment? Should one prize practicality or love? Does respectability entail a life of drudgery, while a life well lived means being branded as “mad”?
Becomes a Woman, Betty Smith’s sort-of warmup to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn now premiering at the Mint Theater Company, begins wonderfully. In the sheet music department of a dime store in Brooklyn, circa 1927, 19-year-old Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price)—she shares the name of the heroine of Smith’s beloved novel, though she’s quite different from the Francie in the book—is working as a song plugger, demonstrating the little-known Jerome Kern–Anne Caldwell “Left All Alone Again Blues,” to the accompaniment of piano-playing pal Florry (Pearl Rhein), while friend/co-worker/roommate Tessie (Gina Daniels) looks on. A lively setting, a swell Kern tune, a trio of sassy girlfriends gabbing about men. A first of three acts that promises a friendly nostalgia trip, in the vein of Smith’s much more famous book. Where are we headed?
Noel Coward’s 1918 play The Rat Trap is a combination of a comedy of manners and a tempestuous domestic drama. Coward, was only 18 when he wrote this play, which addresses women’s rights with psychological realism. Despite various youthful gaucheries, his genius is evident, delineating the theme that was to resurface in later works: the impossibility of love in marriage when spouses are competing egoists. Directed by Alexander Lass, The Rat Trap has all the earmarks of a feminist play, even though the term had yet to be coined.
Elizabeth Baker wrote her first full-length play, Chains, at 32, and after it premiered in London in 1909, critics hailed a “new playwright of unmistakable dramatic genius.” But despite many plays that followed, success in London did not come again for Baker. And so Chains fits into the Mint Theater Company’s mission to “find and produce worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” That mission is fulfilled in remarkable fashion in director Jenn Thompson’s lucid, moving, and exquisitely acted production, which feels both grounded in a specific historical and cultural milieu and yet also relevant today.
D. H. Lawrence wrote The Daughter-in-Law in 1912–13, at the age of 27, around the same time as his novel Sons and Lovers. The play’s first production came posthumously, in 1967. There have been very few productions since, one of which was by the Mint Theater Company, in 2003, fulfilling its mission to “find and produce worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” Now Martin Platt, who directed that production, again takes the reins for the company’s revival of The Daughter-in-Law, currently playing at City Center Stage II.
The Mint Theater Company has once again returned to excavating the long-forgotten dramatic works of Miles Malleson, a 20th-century British actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories presents a pair of one-act dramas based on short stories by the Russian literary giants and adapted by Malleson. Audience members with passing familiarity of works by Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy will surely not expect to see a rom-com double bill, and yet the plays reflect the authors’ depths of compassion and devotion to social and spiritual uplift.
Set on Midsummer’s Eve (June 23), Micheál mac Liammóir’s The Mountains Look Different is about a woman’s attempt to reinvent herself through marriage following years of working as a prostitute in London. First performed at the Gate Theater in Dublin, the noted Irish actor’s play was applauded for its openness by critics and audiences in 1948, but it was also disdained by the God-fearing and narrow-minded Catholic community. However bold it was then, by today’s standards director Aidan Redmond’s revival offers audiences little more than a diorama, a 3-D representation of a bygone era.
Over the next few months, the estimable Mint Theater, committed to rediscovering lost theatrical treasures, is producing three works by English playwright Elizabeth Baker. The first is The Price of Thomas Scott, a 1913 comedy-drama that features a top-notch ensemble of New York actors in a handsomely designed staging directed by Jonathan Bank.
The Mint Theater is reviving another thoroughly engaging play you’ve never heard of. This time it’s Miles Malleson’s Conflict, a 1925 political comedy, with fast-paced direction by Jenn Thompson and brightly polished performances from a noteworthy cast of seven.
Stanley Houghton’s bracingly unsentimental Hindle Wakes failed twice on Broadway, expiring after 30-odd performances in both 1912 and 1922. In a new century, the Mint Theater Company is demonstrating that this little-known play with its perplexing title is a compelling period piece. Directed by Gus Kaikkonen and performed with unrelenting gusto, Hindle Wakes is likely to prove more enduring this time around.
The Mint Theater is continuing its commitment to neglected works this summer with The Suitcase Under the Bed, a collection of four one-act plays written by little-known Irish playwright Teresa Deevy. The female playwright, whose work was produced by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre in the 1930s, has been a continued focus for the Mint since the theater company began its Teresa Deevy Project in 2009.
In 1922, Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne’s The Lucky One was originally produced in New York. Milne is best known for his children stories about a good-natured teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, and his friendship with a boy, Christopher Robin (named after Milne's son). Before the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne had published three novels and 18 plays. Two of them, Mr. Pim Passes By and The Truth About Blayds, the Mint Theater Company has previously resurrected.
