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 Warand 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.