In Friday’s Wall Street Journal I review the Mint Theater’s webcast of Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come. Here’s an excerpt.
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One of the few welcome surprises of 2020 was the announcement by New York’s Mint Theater that it had spent the preceding seven years taping broadcast-ready three-camera archival videos of its off-Broadway productions, and that in lieu of live performances during the pandemic, it would stream these videos for free. As regular readers of this column know, the Mint specializes in small-house revivals of unjustly forgotten 20th-century plays. I have been reviewing one or two of its shows most seasons for the past decade and a half, and each one I’ve seen has been well chosen and flawlessly acted and staged. No other theater company in America has a more consistently high record of artistic quality.
“Days to Come,” the second of 10 plays by Lillian Hellman to open on Broadway in her lifetime, is one of the most significant of the Mint’s recent revivals, for the original production closed in 1936 after just seven performances and disappeared almost without a trace (prior to the Mint’s 2018 staging, which I saw and reviewed, it appears to have had only one revival anywhere). Most flops close for self-evident reasons, but there is no obvious reason why “Days to Come” did so: It is an extremely strong piece of work….
Directing is mainly listening. The director’s first job is to ensure that the actor speaks the text in such a way as to make it intelligible to members of the audience who have not already seen it on the printed page.
