Mint Theater Kicks Off Silver Lining Streaming Series With DAYS TO COME

Mint Theater Company will kick off its Silver Lining Streaming Series today with the on-demand streaming of the HD recording of Days To Come by Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, Toys in the Attic, The Children's Hour), directed by J.R. Sullivan, beginning January 4th and continuing through February 21st. The price of admission is FREE. To receive a password, visit MintTheater.org.

Closed captioning is available for all of Mint's upcoming streaming productions.

Lillian Hellman's second play, Days to Come, is a family drama set against the backdrop of labor strife in a small Ohio town which threatens to tear apart both town and family. "It's the story of innocent people on both sides who are drawn into conflict and events far beyond their comprehension," Hellman said in an interview before Days to Come opened in 1936. "It's the saga of a man who started something he cannot stop..." J.R. Sullivan directs a cast that features Mary Bacon, Janie Brookshire, Larry Bull, Chris Henry Coffey, Dan Daily, Ted Deasy, Roderick Hill, Betsy Hogg, Kim Martin-Cotton, Geoffrey Allen Murphy, and Evan Zes.

Mint has been investing in creating professionally shot and edited full length archival videos since 2013. No Zoom boxes or Computer Generated Imagery - these are professional quality, hi-definition, three-camera recordings of live performances, captured in the theater with live audiences.

"Mint Theater Company's Silver Lining Streaming Series offers archival recordings from six past Mint productions over the first six months in 2021. Last year was a year of heartache and great challenges for so many, but this cloudy year came with a silver lining for the Mint. We enjoyed the gratifying satisfaction of creating work for actors that we love while discovering an appreciative audience of theater lovers across the country and around the world, eager for our special brand of theatrical magic. We have been thrilled to offer our streaming for free to viewers, many of whom enjoyed their first Mint productions from hundreds or thousands of miles away," said Mr. Bank.

The "Silver" of the Silver Lining Streaming Series also refers to the Mint's Silver Anniversary: twenty-five years of unearthing and preserving forgotten plays.

Upcoming productions streaming on demand will include Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy, directed by Jonathan Bank (2/1- 3/28); Women Without Men by Hazel Ellis, directed by Jenn Thompson (2/22 to 3/21); Yours Unfaithfully by Miles Malleson, directed by Jonathan Bank (3/22 to 5/16); A Picture of Autumn by N.C Hunter, directed by Gus Kaikkonen (3/29 to 5/23); and The Fatal Weakness by George Kelly, directed by Jesse Marchese (5/17 to 6/13), all at Mint's virtual theater, MintTheater.org.

Audience response to Mint's streaming has been extraordinary:

• "Your streaming production of Conflict was superb! Bravo to you for capturing it on film, and double-bravo for sharing during the pandemic. With the absence of live theatre (performing and spectating) this was a joy to watch." Pottstown PA
• "We very much enjoyed the play, and it was a wonderful experience amidst this pandemic recalling the enjoyment of live theater. We look forward to the time we can attend in person. Thanks for streaming a wonderful play and engaging production." Newton MA
• "Thank you for streaming some of your productions, which are little gems! I run a Theatre Studies group in Cheshire, UK, we are all retired people, members of the local U3A and in normal times, very keen theatre goers. There are so many wonderful theatres to support here in the UK but it's been just great to see your productions." Bunbury, U.K.
• "I feel like your plays saved my life in lockdown - and others I sent your links to feel the same. Never heard of you. But I love theater and think saving well-made plays a very worthy goal." Red Hook, NY

"Although the Mint Theater Company is justly lauded for its rehabilitation of forgotten works - the group's mission is to bring 'new vitality to worthy but neglected plays' - I don't think Jonathan Bank's outfit gets enough credit for its unwavering dedication to women writers. If I have some issues with the conservative way the productions are staged, I have none with the group's dedication and fairness. The Mint made its reputation with shows by the likes of Harley Granville-Barker, J.B. Priestley and A.A. Milne, but for me, it's the plays written by women that have resonated the most. Maybe because the pay-off is sweeter: These women had descended into an obscurity even more pitch-black than that of the male writers produced by the Mint - if it's hard for female writers to make it to the stage, it's even harder for their works to be revived," said Elisabeth Vincentelli in The NY Post. Mint is proud to offer three long forgotten plays from Lillian Hellman, Teresa Deevy, and Hazel Ellis.

Katie Roche was the third production of Mint's ambitious multi-year project dedicated to the brilliant Teresa Deevy. Mint single-handedly put Deevy back onto the literary map with their acclaimed productions of Wife To James Whelan (2010), Temporal Powers (2011), Katie Roche (2013) and The Suitcase Under the Bed in 2017. "This glowing, evocative production is the third play in the Mint Theater's survey of the work of the nearly forgotten Irish playwright Teresa Deevy. It's a weird and wonderful play from 1936, whose central character, vivaciously brought to complex life by Wrenn Schmidt, is an exuberant serving girl of dubious parentage in a cottage household in Lower Ballycar. Katie has ambitions of sainthood or riches, whichever comes first; then Stanislaus Gregg (Patrick Fitzgerald), the head of the house, asks for her hand. Fitzgerald gives a memorably controlled and borderline creepy performance. The director, Jonathan Bank, with the help of a rich, red-wallpapered set by Vicki R. Davis, and superb, subtle lighting by Nicole Pearce, creates a world in which longing seems tangible. Deevy's dialogue is practically minimalist, but in very few words an entire culture is revealed, and the mysteries of the human heart explored," wrote Ken Marks in The New Yorker. The title role in Katie Roche is played by Wrenn Schmidt who appeared as Julia Sagorsky in HBO's Emmy-nominated "Boardwalk Empire." Also featured in the cast of Katie Roche, directed by Mr. Bank, are Margaret Daly, Patrick Fitzgerald, Jon Fletcher, David Friedlander, Jamie Jackson, John O'Creagh, and Fiana Toibin.

Mint's production of Women Without Men was its first revival since its original two-week run in Dublin in 1938 - and its American Premiere. "Hazel Ellis's Women Without Men, produced by the Mint Theater Company at City Center, concentrates on a group of unmarried women who have stayed school teachers out of helplessness or inertia rather than any calling or passion. Deprived of much freedom and many comforts (they have one afternoon off per week and hot baths are a rationed luxury), they turn on one another, fanning trifling grievances, exaggerating minor slights. A newcomer to the school, the still idealistic Miss Wade (Emily Walton), marvels, 'Why should we all unite in making each other's lives a little hell of trivial tortures?'" said The New York Times. Notably, it continued Mint's efforts to produce the work of forgotten female dramatists. "Ellis wrote only two plays before retiring to marriage and motherhood; one can't help feeling that a fine talent was cut off too soon. Still, this production shows the Mint doing what it does best: finding long-lost works that remain remarkably stage worthy today. There's been much talk about the very real lack of opportunities for new women playwrights in today's theatre. Productions like this cast a light on the fine women talents of the past, bringing them into today's theatrical conversation. That's important work, too," said David Barbour in Lighting and Sound America. Jenn Thompson directed an all-female cast that includes Mary Bacon, Joyce Cohen, Shannon Harrington, Kate Middleton, Aedin Moloney, Alexa Shae Niziak, Kellie Overbey, Dee Pelletier, Beatrice Tulchin, Emily Walton, and Amelia White. Women Without Men was nominated for five Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Play, Outstanding Featured Actress for Kellie Overbey, and Outstanding Director for Jenn Thompson.

For Yours Unfaithfully, a New York Times Critic's Pick, Mint Artistic Director Jonathan Bank directed a cast that featured Todd Cerveris, Mikaela Izquierdo, Elisabeth Gray, Stephen Schnetzer, and 2015 Tony & Drama Desk Award nominee, Max von Essen (An American In Paris). Alexis Soloski, writing in The New York Times said "Yours Unfaithfully, Miles Malleson's 1933 play, now receiving its world premiere at the Mint Theater, is a refined, rueful and often shrewd comedy about polyamory, written decades before open relationships were quite so openly discussed. In some ways, it's surprising that it went unproduced for so long. Its subject is no more scandalous than those of several plays by George Bernard Shaw or Harley Granville Barker, another Mint favorite. Yours Unfaithfully is both a daring play and a highly conventional one. Under the polished direction of Jonathan Bank, and in the hands of a fine team of designers, its arguments remain provocative, while its structure feels familiar, its tone decorous. Maybe that only makes it more unusual. It's a bit like a sex farce with real sorrow instead of slammed doors, and something like a drawing room comedy with moral conundrums peeking out beneath the cushions. It is often very funny; it is also very nearly a tragedy."

Terry Teachout, reviewing in The Wall Street Journal said "the Mint Theater, which has a near-perfect track record of exhuming forgotten plays of the previous century that deserve a happier fate, has gone back to the well with George Kelly, the once-famous author of The Show-Off, whose Philip Goes Forth the Mint produced to brilliant effect last season. This time around it is The Fatal Weakness, an identically impressive play by Mr. Kelly that opened on Broadway in 1946, ran for three months and thereafter went unseen until now. No doubt the ambiguity of The Fatal Weakness explains its initial lack of success. It's a smart, polished not-quite-comedy about the high price of adultery whose upper-crust characters are unlikable and whose moral-if you care to call it that-is uncomfortable. As usual at the Mint, the acting and staging are smoothly impeccable (with Cynthia Darlow making the biggest splash as a relentlessly gossipy busybody), and Vicki R. Davis's sitting-room set looks like the kind of thing you'd see on Broadway if Broadway still did plays like this." "Here in 2014, the Mint Theater Company is making this George Kelly work an amusing, affecting reminder that the institution of marriage has been under siege for much longer than we tend to think. Another fine revisiting by the Mint Theater Company. The play starts out as a comedy but ends as a rather poignant melodrama, and it shows us that the epidemic of divorce and the questioning of marriage as an institution are not the recent phenomena that we might have thought," said Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times.

Mint was awarded an OBIE Award for "combining the excitement of discovery with the richness of tradition" and a special Drama Desk Award for "unearthing, presenting and preserving forgotten plays of merit."

To learn more about Mint's On Demand Streaming, go to minttheater.org. The price of admission is FREE. To receive a password, visit MintTheater.org.

For more information, including photos and videos of all previous Mint productions, visit minttheater.org.

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