Mint Theater Extends 'The Glass Cage' Through 11/8

The Drama Desk and Obie Award-wining Mint Theater Company kicks off their 2008-2009 season with the American Premiere of J. B. Priestley’s The Glass Cage, and is proud to announce that performances will continue through November 8th.

Lou Jacob directs a cast that includes Gerry Bamman (Nixon’s Nixon), Chet Carlin, Chad Hoeppner, Aaron Krohn (The Farnsworth Invention), 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”).

“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 Thomas 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. “J.B. Priestley’s The Glass Cage at the Mint is wondrous,” writes Peter Filichia in Theatremania, “one of those terrific plays where you know immediately who the good and the bad guys are from the very beginning, only to be not so sure as the play steamrolls along.”

The Glass Cage is a taut drama about the danger old family wounds left unattended. “The wealthy and sheltered McBane’s of Toronto, in J. B. Priestley’s brilliant drama from 1957, are a smug, spoiled, straitlaced bunch, and they’re certain that their three young relatives, coming to visit for the first time, will be savages, like their Indian mother, and drunkards, like their dissolute father. And they’re right: the visitors are as hot and wild as fire, and they come with a plan to do great harm. In this fully relevant revival, the performances by Saxon Palmer and Jeanine Serralles, as two of the three young people, pop like bright flowers.” (The New Yorker)

"Splendidly staged by Lou Jacob with a near-perfect cast,” writes Time Out New York.  The ensemble seems to love spending time inside a masterful drama. For us in the audience, the feeling’s mutual”

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

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