On March 11, 2020, Mint Theater Company completed casting for our production of Chains by Elizabeth Baker. The following day, every theater in New York shut down… Now, Miss Baker is back, along with every one of the eleven actors we cast two years ago. Mint returns to Theatre Row with Chains, Baker’s remarkable debut play, beginning June 7, at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd St.
ORDER YOUR TICKETS TODAY! ONLINE: MINTTHEATER.ORG PHONE: (212) 714-2442 EX. 45 IN PERSON: 410 WEST 42ND ST NY, NY 10036 CALL FOR HOURS. PERFORMANCES: Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri, & Sat at 7:30 pm; Wed, Sat, & Sun at 2:00 pm
NO PERFORMANCE: 6/19, 6/24, 7/5, 7/12 NO 7:30 PM PERFORMANCE 6/29 NO 2:00 PM PERFORMANCE 6/08 Use code FPC22 for FPC pricing: Premium Seating $65* Standard Seating $45* CheapTix $35* *(+ fees and service charge) $2.50 restoration fee $4.00 Phone / Internet service charge
Penelope Forgives by
Elizabeth Baker
JUNE 29 - BOOK NOW! ONLINE: MINTTHEATER.ORG PHONE: (212) 714-2442 EX. 45 IN PERSON: 410 WEST 42ND ST NY, NY 10036 CALL FOR HOURS. Mint Further Readings are FREE for members of the First Priority Club, use code FPCMMB.
FURTHER READINGS
In 1909, Elizabeth Baker went from “obscure stenographer making five dollars a week” to “one of the most widely discussed playwrights in London” when Chains had a one-performance “try-out” at the Royal Court in London. The Times and The Globe both called Chains “remarkable.” The next year, Baker’s drama was running in repertory with the plays of Galsworthy, Barrie, Granville-Barker and Shaw and was hailed as “the most brilliant and the deepest problem play by a modern British writer since Major Barbara.” “It is a tale that grips you from the first moment to the last. Every line of it throbs with a real humanity, and the characters that develop from it are living things…Chains is one of the GREATEST PLAYS that has been produced in this country for many a long day, and Suffragists will be delighted to note that it has been written by—a woman.” Chains tells the stories of a few ordinary people yearning for a less ordinary life. Charley lives with his wife Lily in suburban London, sharing a cramped house with a lodger. Charley commutes daily to an office in London, his only pleasure is the tiny garden patch beside the house which gives little satisfaction. Charley’s sister-in-law, Maggie, finds the drudgery of shop work so stifling that she plots an escape by marrying a kind man she doesn’t love—an escape that can’t provide the adventure she craves. Charley & Maggie are both shaken when Charley’s lodger announces that he’s tired of the grind and he’s leaving for Australia—the day after tomorrow. His decision sends a tremor through the family that threatens to break the ties that bind Maggie and Charley to their ordinary lives. “There is a touch of genius in its absolute sincerity and pathos. Not one word too much, not one situation too extreme mars it.” Baker was applauded for her “keenness of observation, her powers of drawing characters from the life, and her gift of writing dialogue that is natural and unforced,” but much of the attention had an astonished, condescending tone. “How came Miss Elizabeth Baker, an unknown, inexperienced playwright, to give us a work so fresh, so unconventional, and in a sense, so stimulating as this? One is given to understand that she has not previously tried her hand at dramatic authorship, and that she has lived laborious days hitherto in a City office as a typewriter. ” Elizabeth Baker “This is Miss Elizabeth Baker, a typist, who though little more than a girl, and absolutely without either stage connections or stage experience, has thus had her first attempt at a full-blown four-act play launched straight away upon the world by one of the keenest and most competent of all dramatic societies.” The Buffalo Sunday Morning News, 1909 Baker may have been just canny enough to allow this misperception of her youth to stand uncorrected. In fact, she was a 32-year-old spinster when Chains was produced. And while it’s true she lacked experience, her success was not the luck of an untaught amateur, it was evidence of her gift and a sign of her ambition. Baker followed Chains with a versatile range of challenging and original plays that premiered on the stages of England’s repertory theaters, as well as in the West End. These included Edith (1912), a one-act feminist comedy for the Women Writer’s Suffrage League; the comic drama The Price of Thomas Scott (1913, Gaiety Theatre, Manchester and Mint Theater Company 2019); and her scintillating business-world comedy Partnership (1917, Court Theatre). Long independent, Baker also found mid-life romance with James Edmund Allaway, a widower who worked in the upholstery trade; she married him in 1915, at the age of forty. In 1922, the pair emigrated for two years to the Cook Islands. Were they inspired by her own characters in Chains, or was her play evidence of a lifelong appetite for adventure? “The author has chosen a subject she knows, a set of people whom she has observed, about whom she has thought keenly, humorously, tenderly; she knows their conditions and their troubles; and she has put them before us with so much wisdom, sincerity, and sympathy, and with so much of the genuine dramatist’s gift of presentation, that their story commands our attention and interest from start to finish.” The Times, 1909
MEET THE CAST OF
Jeremy Beck
Anthony Cochrane
Laakan McHardy
Peterson Townsend
Ned Noyes
Amelia White
MINT ALUMNI:
:
Christopher Gerson
Olivia Gilliatt
Claire Saunders
Brian Owen
Avery Whitted
Recognize some of those faces? We are delighted to welcome back three Mint alumni!
Jeremy Beck in Hindle Wakes
Ned Noyes in The New Morality
Amelia White in Conflict
PLEASE NOTE: We are relying more on email these days and we want to be sure that we’re reaching you. If you are not receiving our emails, will you please let us know? Write to Matthew@MintTheater.org or call 212-315-9434 and leave a message. We’ll call you back and get this sorted. And in case you’ve lost track, your last gift to the Mint was $_________ which we received on ____________.
MEET MISS BAKER DAY - JUNE 29, 2022 Post-show talk after the 2:00 pm matinee and a Further Reading at 7:30. Join us for one just one of these events or for the full day. See a matinee of Chains followed by a post-show talk with Mint’s Resident Dramaturgical Advisor. After a break for dinner, return to Theatre Row for a reading of Baker’s play Penelope Forgives, introduced by Kristin Celello from CUNY Queens College.
MAYA CANTU: “How Came Miss Elizabeth Baker…?: The Critical Reception of Chains.” Since 2013, Maya has worked on sixteen productions at the Mint. She is the author of the book, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For her essay “Beyond the Rue Pigalle: Recovering Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith as ‘Muse,’ Mentor, and Maker of Transatlantic Musical Theater,” published in Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity, Maya was selected as the 2020 recipient of the American Theatre and Drama Society’s Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award. Maya teaches on the Drama and Literature faculties at Bennington College, and received her D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama.
Penelope Forgives by ELIZABETH BAKER introduced by Kristin Celello (Free for Members of the First-Priority Club – use code FPCMMB, $25 for non-members) This play premiered 21 years after Baker made her dramatic debut with Chains. In both plays Baker considers the ties that bind, but Penelope… is a “radical and explicit challenge to the institution of marriage as it stands.” Penelope Forgives was Baker’s only produced play that was never published. Mint obtained a copy of the typescript from the Lord Chamberlain’s collection at the British Library and is delighted to share it with Mint’s audience. “The 1930 Players attained some measure of distinction with their first venture, as it was a new play from the pen of Miss Elizabeth Baker. From the authoress of Chains a play is always welcome. In her present work, Miss Baker has once again shown that she can write with sympathy, understanding and not a little humor, about mankind’s frailties. This time it is “mankind” used in its most restricted sense—for the theme is masculine marital infidelity.” KRISTIN CELELLO is Associate Professor of History at Queens College. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Virginia in 2004. She is the author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and the co-editor of a volume titled Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her current book project is After Divorce: Parents, Children, and the Modern American Family.
Penelope Forgives
Dinner?
FREE for First Priority Club members. Use code FPCMMB June 29, 2022 at 7:30 pm
Would you like to join other “Mint-ies” for a casual meal between events? We’ve reserved a restaurant, join us!
RESERVE YOUR TICKETS NOW ONLINE: tinyurl.com/penelopeforgives PHONE: (212) 714-2442 EX. 45 IN PERSON: 410 WEST 42ND ST NY, NY 10036
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED, LET US KNOW BY EMAIL: MINTTHEATER@MINTTHEATER.ORG BY PHONE: LEAVE A MESSAGE AT (212) 315-9434
Jonathan
At Theater Row 410 W. 42nd Street Tickets on sale now! June 7 through July 17 Performances: Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri, & Sat at 7:30 pm; Wed, Sat, & Sun at 2:00 pm No Performance: 6/19, 6/24, 7/5, 7/12 No 7:30 pm performance 6/29 No 2:00 pm performance 6/08 Call Theater Row box office at: (212) 714-2442 EX. 45 USE CODE FPC22
412 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036
As a nod in the direction of our previous plans, we are having a Meet Miss Baker Day on June 29th, where we’ll have a matinee performance, a post-show EnrichMint Event and a reading of Baker’s play Penelope Forgives in the evening, introduced by another speaker. If there’s enough interest, we’ll have a dinner in between where we can socialize a little. Details are inside the newsletter—and remember, the reading is FREE for you, our First Priority Club Members. All the best,
FIRST PRIORITY CLUB NEWS
www.minttheater.org 212.315.0231
Many of you will remember that Mint was looking forward to a summer in 2020 with two plays by Elizabeth Baker running simultaneously in two theaters at Theatre Row. I trust you’ll understand that times today are too uncertain for such an ambitious undertaking— but I can assure you I’m still committed to Elizabeth Baker and looking forward to offering you her comedy Partnership in the future.
From your friends at Mint Theater
Dear Friends,