Monday March 22nd, 7:30pm
CHURCH STREET
By Lennox Robinson, Directed by Suzanne Agins
Last fall we introduced you to the wit and charm of Lennox Robinson, author of IS LIFE WORTH L IVING? Robinson was a prolific and gifted artist who wrote several dozen plays, many well worth our attention.
CHURCH STREET is a touching and heartfelt story of a playwright who has returned home to Ireland after suffering a disappointment on the grand stage of London. Friends and relatives gather to welcome him home. They now all seem impossibly dull to him until a wise aunt challenges him to imagine the drama that lurks beneath the surface and the result is “as original in treatment as it is novel in theme,” as The New York Times wrote of the Dublin production in 1934: “Delicately beautiful in its pathos and its sympathetic understanding.”
CHURCH STREET is a surprising and deeply moving short play that shows Robinson in a very different light from IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? You’ll recognize his cunning wit and the sympathy he has for his characters but you’ll be surprised by his thoughtful subtlety and his bold experiment with form.
“Only a master craftsman could attempt such a play with any hope of success,” writes the Irish Times. Robinson was indeed a master craftsman. Please join us for a reading of this special play; we’re confident that you will agree.
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Monday May 24, 7:30
PROFESSOR BERNHARDI
By Arthur Schnitzler
Longtime friends of the Mint know Arthur Schnitzler as the Austrian playwright who wrote plays of piercing psychological insight; Mint has produced his dramas FAR AND WIDE and THE LONELY WAY.
PROFESSOR BERNHARDI is considered by some to be Schnitzler’s most notable play. In it, he addresses the problem of anti-Semitism in Austria prior to the First World War. “Instead of preaching against it, Schnitzler, like a scientist, merely shows one case of its working itself out and lets us draw the moral conclusions. Yes, says Schnitzler, that is how men are. A brilliant Jewish doctor at the head of a hospital in Vienna is going to make enemies, who are going to fight with all the hypocrisy at their command until he is deposed. Professor Bernhardi, in daring to keep a priest from giving a patient the last sacraments, has taken on a foe that will destroy him.” (excerpted from the 1968 Times review of Vienna’s Burgtheater production at City Center).
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