Mint Theater's THE WIDOWING OF MRS HOLROYD Extends Thru 4/5

The Drama Desk and Obie Award-wining Mint Theater Company (Jonathan Bank, Artistic Director) continues the 2008-2009 season with The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd by D.H. Lawrence opening March 1st. Today Mint announced it would extend the production through April 5th.

Five years ago Mint Theater introduced New York audiences to D. H. Lawrence - the playwright - with their highly acclaimed production of The Daughter-in-Law, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival and named one of the highlights of 2003 by The New York Times. Audiences and critics alike were surprised to learn that Lawrence had written a play - in fact he wrote eight. Only two were produced in his lifetime, both in small productions; Lawrence was not able to see either. Lawrence was frustrated by his inability to find a producer willing to take a chance on him. "I believe that just as an audience was found in Russia for Chekhov, so an audience might be found in England for some of my stuff, if there were a man to whip 'em in. It's the producer that is lacking, not the audience." Now the Mint offers the New York Premiere of The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd.

The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd is the story of a marriage in trouble. It is the story of a husband trying to escape the scorn and bitterness of a woman who resents the hold he has on her. It is the story of a wife trying desperately to make a safe home for her young children amidst the coarseness of a soot-blackened coal mining village-safe from her drunken husband, from her meddling mother-in-law-and from the passion of the man who wants to take her away. "This is a moving play about the tension between men and women: the essential misunderstandings and necessary needs," Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times in 1973, when the play was presented at the Long Wharf in CT. "It contrasts the power of sexuality with the power of peace. And neither wins..."

The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd was written in 1910 when Lawrence was twenty-five and experiencing his first success as a published poet while still teaching school in a London suburb. It was his second play and it expands upon a tale that Lawrence first told in his short story The Odour of Chrysanthemums, which was unpublished when he composed the play.

In 1965 the Complete Plays of D.H. Lawrence was published containing all eight of his full-length dramas and in 1968 three of those plays (A Collier's Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law & The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd) were produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London under the direction of Peter Gill. This Lawrence 'tryptych' began to shine a light down the dark mine shaft where Lawrence's powerful dramas had lain neglected. The power and simplicity of Lawrence's creation was immediately evident: "a truth and purity which makes the theatre's normal currency of charm, humour and spectacle seem vulgar," declared Ronald Bryden of The Observer in 1968. "Lawrence has given the English Theatre as fine a work as it has produced in this century. Its fineness makes a critic long for means of compelling you to see it without resort to his inevitable vocabulary of praise or persuasion...It needs a language clean of blandishment and huckstering to convey the steel-sharp purity of Lawrence's writing here...Already he is a master of concentration, of burning intensity, distilling from a naturalism homely as potatoes a fiery, white and ice-cold emotion which shocks like a gulp of liquid energy."

For The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd, Stuart Howard directs a cast that includes Eric Martin Brown, Allyn Burrows, Julia Coffey, Nick Cordileone, Randy Danson, Dalton Harrod, Emma Kantor, Arthur Lazalde, Amanda Roberts, Sheila Stasack, James Warke, Lance Wertz, and Pilar Witherspoon. The Widowing Of Mrs. Holroyd will have set design by Marion Williams, costume design by Martha Hally, lighting design by Jeff Nellis and sound design by Jane Shaw.

Performances continue through April 5th. Opening Night is set for March 1st. Performances will be Tuesday through Thursday at 7PM, Friday at 8PM, Saturday at 2 PM and 8 PM and Sunday at 2 PM. All performances will take place on the Third Floor of 311 West 43rd Street. Tickets will be $55. "25 UNDER 25" tickets, $25 for anyone under 25 years of age, are also available for all performances, subject to availability.

For more information, visit www.minttheater.org or call 212/315-0231.

 

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