Mint Theater Company Announces 2008-09 Season

The Drama Desk and Obie Award-wining Mint Theater Company today announced their upcoming season. The first play of the 2008-2009 season will be the American Premiere of J. B. Priestley's The Glass Cage, followed by The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd by D.H. Lawrence in February.   

For The Glass Cage, Lou Jacob directs a cast that includes Gerry Bamman (Nixon's Nixon), Chet Carlin, Michael Crane, Chad Hoeppner, Robin Moseley, Saxon Palmer, Jeanine Serralles (The Misanthrope, NYTW), Sandra Struthers-Clerc, Fiana Toibin (Long Day's Journey..., Broadway), and Jack Wetherall (The Elephant Man, "Queer as Folk"). The Glass Cage will have set design by Roger Hanna, costume design by Camille Assaf, lighting design by Marcus Doshi and sound design by Lindsay Jones.

"J.B. Priestley keeps being rediscovered," writes the London Times, because "he's never really gone away."  In the mid-1990s, New York audiences thrilled to Priestley's prescient modernity in An Inspector Calls on Broadway and Dangerous Corner (adapted by David Mamet for the Atlantic Theater).  Now Mint Theater Company presents the American premiere of his 1957 masterwork, The Glass Cage. Priestley's drama of "fears, prejudices, hypocrisies and lies" was first brought to light in 2001 when his son Tom recommended it for a reading as part of a Priestley Festival. A full production followed in 2007 at the Royal Theatre, Northampton—the first in fifty years—where it was hailed as a "not-to-be-missed revival" by the Oxford Times.  "This is what real theatre is all about," declared The Stage. "Not all theatrical rarities are worth unearthing," wrote Paul Taylor in The Independent, "This one resoundingly is." The Glass Cage is a taut drama about the danger old family wounds left unattended.  

The McBanes are a pious, Bible-thumping lot, dominated by the bullying David and his bachelor brother, Malcolm. Into their midst comes a strange trio of siblings, the fruits of a marriage between a third, wild McBane brother and a Native American woman.  As the three disrupt the puritanical household with their boozing and sexual seduction, we are kept in the dark as to their ultimate purpose. Finally, Priestley makes it clear that they are hell-bent on revenge for the way their late dad was cheated of his rightful inheritance.  Priestley dispenses with his usual English setting in favor of Toronto, 1906. Priestley slowly ratchets up the tension in his suspenseful tale before surprising us with his true purpose.  "Just as it seems that this play is going firmly in one direction," the Oxford Times writes admiringly, "the old stage magician Priestley swiftly conjures it somewhere quite different."  "It's hard to believe one would think of Pinter when watching J B Priestley," observes The Telegraph, "but The Glass Cage—unseen for 50 years—carries much of the calculated menace that the former was beginning to unleash on the London stage."

Five years ago Mint Theater Company introduced New York audiences to D. H. Lawrence—the playwright—with our highly acclaimed production of The Daughter-in-Law, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival and was named one of the highlights of 2003 by The New York Times.  Audiences and critics alike were surprised to learn that Lawrence had written a play—in fact he wrote eight.  Only two were produced in his lifetime, both in small productions; Lawrence was not able to see either.  Lawrence was frustrated by his inability to find a producer willing to take a chance on him.  "I believe that just as an audience was found in Russia for Chekhov, so an audience might be found in England for some of my stuff, if there were a man to whip 'em in.  It's the producer that is lacking, not the audience." When Mint took its chance on Lawrence, that assessment proved prophetic.  The first fifty-four performances of The Daughter-in-Law were sold-out and a run that was only scheduled to run six weeks continued for twenty.  In February 2009, Mint Theater Company will bring you another Lawrence masterpiece, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd.  When this heart wrenching romance received its American Premiere at the Long Wharf Theater in 1973, Clive Barnes' review in The New York Times was rhapsodic:
 
"It is perfectly possible that one of the most important playwrights of the nineteen-seventies will turn out to be a man who died in 1935.  The name is D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence—as anyone who read his novels might have guessed—was a natural playwright.  Mrs. Holroyd was written in 1914 and unsuccessfully produced in 1920.  Perhaps it was in advance of its time.  It is realistic and factual.... It hews at the playwright's past like a miner at the coalface.  In this way it has the tortured remembrances of an O'Neill.  And the language is that of a sparse and spare poet who chose prose. Mrs. Holroyd (we never `learn her first name) has comet to hate her husband.  He is a miner.  She is slightly better educated, and in a slightly different social class. He is an attractive man—but he drinks and goes with other women.  Another coal worker—an electrician rather than a miner—wants to take her two children away to Spain.  Lawrence is a writer of spasmodic but infinite insight.  There are times when you wonder where he is wandering. Yet there are other times, the important times, when you see that he has defined the co-existential worlds of men and women (that supreme cosmic joke) with quite surgical precision. Scalpels are wielded, blood is let, but everything is sewn up as tidily as the victim's condition will allow. This is a moving play about the tension between men and women: the essential misunderstandings and the necessary needs.  It contrasts the power of sexuality with the power of peace. And neither wins, although at the end there is some kind of compassionate understanding of two wasted lives.  It is a bold writer who tells the story of his play in the title, but Lawrence was in no way a conventional playwright.  He depicted men and women as he knew them in a background he remembered. Here it results in a domestic tragedy—small-scale but deeply etched."

All performances will take place on the Third Floor of 311 West 43rd Street. For more information, visit www.minttheater.org

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