Mint Theater Starts Season with The Skin Game, July 10-Aug 14

By: Jun. 14, 2005
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 The Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Mint Theater will open their 14th season with The Skin Game, an overlooked play by Nobel Prize-winner John Galsworthy. Directed by Tony Award-nominee Eleanor Reissa (Those Were the Days), the play will begin performances on Tuesday, June 21st, with an opening night on Sunday, July 10th, continuing through August 14th.

"The Skin Game," as described in a press release, "is the ever-timely story of a bare-knuckled brawl between neighbors. One man treasures the precious view that his family has enjoyed from their windows for generations, and the other would block that view in the name of economic development, progress and his own social advancement."

Galsworthy's plays were produced on Broadway as well as in London. The Skin Game came to New York in the fall of 1920 where it ran for 176 performances. In 1931, the play was made into a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock who was also responsible for the adapted screenplay. "Mr. Hitchcock…cannot be said to have accomplished either task in a fashion the subject deserves," said The New York Times, "Galsworthy's estimable play…has been sapped of its persuasive drama." Strife, Loyalties and Justice were among his other more successful works. Justice is credited with having inspired Winston Churchill, then England's Home Secretary to institute prison reform in England in 1910. "The seeds of reform were sowed in his mind," a report to The New York Times said, "through witnessing recently a performance of John Galsworthy's stirring prison drama Justice. Mr. Churchill, who was present at the second performance, sat through the play in a most absorbed manner, his friends noticing that he was deeply affected by it."

Galsworthy, best known for his trilogy of novels, The Forsyte Saga, was the author of twenty novels, over one-hundred and fifty stories and twenty-seven plays and is the recipient of the Order of Merit, England's highest distinction for an artist, First President of International PEN, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932. 

Mint Theater Company, "that truffle hound of half-buried treasures from the past" (Village Voice), has a celebrated reputation for re-discovering neglected gems such as J.M. Barrie's Echoes of the War and D.H. Lawrence's The Daughter-in-Law, which was nominated for a 2004 Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Revival and named by The New York Times as one of the top ten productions of the year in 2003.

Performances of The Skin Game will take place in the theater on the Third floor of 311 West 43rd Street, two floors down from the Mint's usual home. For tickets and information on The Skin Game, visit www.minttheater.org.
 


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