Mint Theater Company Spring Benefit: Light Falling by Teresa Deevy
Monday April 11th, 2011 at The Players Club Volume VIII , Issue 3 February, 2011
Mint Theater’s spring benefit will be held at the Players Club on Monday, April 11. The evening will feature a reading of Teresa Deevy’s brilliant one-act play, Light Falling, her last ever to be produced. Never published, the play will be seen for the first time in 50 years, using a typescript rescued from the Deevy family home in Ireland last spring by director Jonathan Bank.
Light Falling is a polished gem, exquisitely beautiful and refined. It is the story of a great love endangered by carelessness. “In this play,” writes John Jordan, one of Ireland’s greatest critics, “Deevy began to work in the field of pure, unexplicated, poetic statement.” Teresa Deevy has been described by the Irish Times as “one of the most undeservedly neglected and significant Irish playwrights of the 20th century”. When Mint launched the Deevy Project earlier this season with Wife to James Whelan, she was virtually unknown. Thanks to the work of the Mint, Wife to James Whelan has been acclaimed in New York, written about both here and abroad and will receive its London premiere this April. Next summer the Deevy Project will continue with the American premiere of Temporal Powers, last seen in 1937. The project will culminate with the publication of Deevy’s Collected Works. It is therefore fitting that the centerpiece of this year’s benefit will be a staged reading of Light Falling, Deevy’s last produced play and an extraordinary testament to her talent. Proceeds from this year’s event will support the Teresa Deevy Project, one of the Mint’s most significant undertakings ever. Please join us for what promises to be a very special evening. In 1888, Edwin Booth, America’s pre-eminent Shakespearean actor, and 15 other incorporators, founded The Players. Modeled after London’s famed Garrick Club, The Players was the first American “gentleman’s club” of its kind. The Players, located in a Greek Revival townhouse facing historic Gramercy Park, is also home to the Hampden-Booth Theater Library, reflecting Booth’s express wish to create “a library relating especially to the history of the American stage and the preservation of pictures, bills of the play, photographs, and curiosities connected with such history...”.
The Players Club 16 Gramercy Park South
The Players continues to preserve its heritage by remaining a repository of both American and British theater history, memorabilia, and theatrical artifacts. Visitors can view one of the finest collections of theatrical art extant. Theatrical memorabilia like rare playbills from the 19th and 20th centuries, the Savonarola chair used by John Barrymore when playing Hamlet and Mark Twain’s pool cue are also on display.