Special Events

EnrichMint Events are supported in part by a grant from The New York Council for the Humanities and the Michael Tuch Foundation.

All events take place immediately after the performance and usually last about 50 minutes and are free and open to the public. Speakers and dates subject to change without notice.

DID YOU KNOW? Video recordings of some of our EnrichMint Events are now available for viewing on your computer? CLICK HERE

A Man and Some Women
by Githa Sowerby
(author of Rutherford & Son)

Mon. Feb. 13th at 6pm
Join us for dinner and a discussion at EtceteraEtcetera with Patricia Riley, author of Looking for Githa, followed by the reading at the Mint.

Purchase tickets online or call 212-315-0231

Dinner & Reading- 6pm: $60

Reading ONLY- 8pm: $25 (free for FPC members)

EtceteraEtcetera is located at 352 W. 44th St.
(between 8th and 9th Ave.)

A MAN AND SOME WOMEN tells the story of Richard Shannon who forfeits a post on an important scientific exploration in order to support “some women” who depend on him: his wife and his two unmarried sisters along with a family friend. When suspicion of his infidelity arises, poisonous gossip forces Richard to re-evaluate the choices he has made and consider his future.

The play debuted in 1914 at the influential Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. Sowerby hoped for a London transfer. She had bad timing. Britain’s escalating involvement in the First World War meant dwindling demand for thoughtful drama. The play never made it out of Manchester, and was never published.

A MAN AND SOME WOMEN was forgotten until 1995, when a small Bristol company revived it to positive notices. “So RUTHERFORD AND SON wasn’t a one-off wonder…. Sowerby’s intelligent and heartfelt examination of personal freedom makes compelling theatre,” wrote The Independent.

A MAN AND SOME WOMEN is scheduled for production at the Shaw Festival in Canada this summer, but you have an opportunity to hear the play here, on February 13^th.

We’ve brought over Pat Riley, Leeds-based author and the world’s leading authority on Githa Sowerby, to share her groundbreaking insights into Sowerby’s life and work during three special EnrichMint Events.

The details of Githa Sowerby’s life were a mystery until Pat Riley wrote Looking for Githa, the first Sowerby biography, in 2009. During her research, Riley uncovered previously unknown documents in England and Canada and conducted several interviews with Sowerby’s elderly daughter Joan. The project was funded by the Arts Council of England.

Ms. Riley has degrees in law, social science, and management. On retirement from a career in government, she began a degree in theatre studies, deepening her life-long love of theatre. During her coursework, she was introduced to a powerful play by an early twentieth century feminist playwright no one seemed to know anything about—Rutherford and Son by Githa Sowerby. Curious to discover what kind of a woman had been brave enough in 1912 to wrote this play, Ms. Riley began the research that ended with the publication of Looking for Githa.

ON THE PLAY AND ITS AUTHOR
Three leading scholars from the Ivy League—Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell—join us for
discussions on Rutherford & Son and playwright Githa Sowerby.

Michael Cadden is currently Director of the Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University, where he has been teaching for 25 years. In 1993, Michael was awarded the University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2003, he helped inaugurate Princeton’s new Roger S. Berlind Theater. He began his career at Yale School of Drama, where he worked for four years as a dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre under Lloyd Richards and as a lecturer in the dramaturgy, directing, and acting programs.

Martin Meisel is the Brander Matthews Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Literature at Columbia. He is the author of Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton and Oxford), Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton), as well as numerous essays and articles on drama and the visual arts. He has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Edinburgh); and of awards from the American

Philosophical Society and the Huntington Library among others. In 2003 he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia.

Soon after moving to London, Githa Sowerby joined the Fabian Society, becoming a member of the influential group of writers, artists, and public intellectuals that included Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Dr. Gainor will discuss how Sowerby’s affiliation with the Fabian Socialists profoundly affected her playwriting.

J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Cornell. A specialist in British and American drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and women’s dramaturgy, she is the author of the award-winning studies Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender and Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture and Politics 1915-48. Most recently, she edited The Norton Anthology of Drama. She has edited two influential essay collections, Imperialism and Theatre and Performing America: Culture Nationalism in American Theater. With Linda Ben-Zvi, she co-edited The Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell, the first complete anthology of Glaspell’s plays. Dr. Gainor is currently editing the Collected Works of Githa Sowerby.

ON THE ISSUES
Dr. Donald J. Jonovic, an internationally respected family business consultant, will discuss the play’s portrayal of family business and intergenerational conflict.

Sunday March 4th, after the matinee
Donald J. Jonovic, Founder, Family Business Management Services, Inc.

Donald J. Jonovic has been an advisor to family business owners since 1973, focusing on the unique issues related to management development, growth, and ownership transition, particularly ownership transition of the successful owner-managed business. His professional consulting practice has included industrial and agricultural clients throughout North America, ranging in size from $5 million to $2 billion.