The Mint Theater Company Presents Rare Play Soldier's Wife in Feb.
By: BWW News Desk Jan. 18, 2006
Soldier's Wife is a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of World War II. "John Rogers is the soldier; after 18 months in the South Pacific he has been invalided home and is greeted there by a baby boy who he is meeting for the first time and Kate, his wife who has learned self-sufficiency in his absence. Adjusting to the challenges of a new domestic equation is further complicated by the sudden and unexpected fame that is thrust upon Kate when letters she has written to John are published to great acclaim in a book entitled: Soldier's Wife," according to press notes. The play was a critical and moderate popular hit in 1944. The New Yorker wrote, "Franken's dialogue fairly sparkles with wit and naturalness," calling the play "a delightful and entertaining piece with a few moving sequences and several brilliantly humorous episodes."
Rose Franken was a professional writer for over forty years beginning with her novel Patterns in 1925, published by Max Perkins at Scribners, and concluding with her humorous book You're Well Out of the Hospital in 1966 when she was seventy-one. Franken was a Broadway playwright and director, as well as Hollywood screenwriter and novelist. She achieved fame and fortune as the author of the phenomenally successful Claudia stories, serialized in Redbook and Good Housekeeping and published in eight books between 1939 and 1957.
"...Audiences may find that the ever-present awareness of the wartime ordeal of its central characters lends poignancy to Soldier's Wife, although the play, like most of Franken's work, is essentially the story of the joys and complications of married life. While Franken was writing the play, her own son, only 24 years old, had been away for three years on active duty. In an interview at the time, she talked about her son and other soldiers "—cut off from home ties for three, four, perhaps five years. What will the separation do to them? I have been reading his letters anxiously, trying to find out what is happening to him, whether he has changed, what he is thinking and feeling out there."
Soldier's Wife will take place in the theater on the Third Floor of 311 West 43rd Street. Performances, which begin February 7th and run though April 2nd, will be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings at 7 PM, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 PM. Tickets will be $35 through February 18th and $45 thereafter and are available by calling (212) 315-0231 or online at www.minttheater.org.
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