'Walking Down Broadway' at the Mint Theatre

Mint Theater Company presents the world premiere Walking Down Broadway, by Dawn Powell, at the Mint Theatre from the 15 Sep - 6 Nov 2005

Walking Down Broadway was written in 1931 and never produced, although Fox bought the rights for Erich von Stroheim who made it into the movie Hello, Sister, which bears almost no resemblance to Powell�s play.

Marge and Elsie are two young girls newly arrived in New York from Marble Falls, Ohio. They work in an office, live in a rooming house on the upper west side and dream of the romance and glamour that lured them away from home in the first place. Unable to bear another night alone, they take to walking up and down Broadway where they meet two equally lonely and innocent young men.

Walking Down Broadway tells the story of love and lost innocence as unspoiled small-town naivet� collides with the bitterness and cynicism of world-weary New Yorkers�a theme that runs through almost all of Powell�s writing.

Directed by Steven Williford, Walking Down Broadway features Christine Albright, Denis Butkus, Antony Hagopian, Carol Halstead, Amanda Jones, Emily Moment, Stacy Parker, Ben Roberts, Cherene Snow, and Sammy Tunis.

The play has set design by Roger Hanna, costume design by Brenda Turpin, lighting by Stephen Petrilli and sound by Jane Shaw.

Dawn Powell, author of 16 novels, over 100 stories and 10 plays, was undervalued in her lifetime and virtually forgotten after her death�although she has never been without her ardent fans. Gore Vidal, a friend and champion wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books in 1987 stating that Powell, �should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald...� The 1998 review of Powell�s biography in The New York Times asserts that Powell is �wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh...�

The last fifteen years have seen a great resurgence of interest in Powell�s writing, including her diaries, released in 1995 � described by Terry Teachout in The New York Times as �one of the outstanding literary finds of the last quarter-century.� The New York Times review of her Selected Letters goes so far as to say that �one is tempted to suggest that what we now think of as the contemporary American voice�in journalism and the arts�is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York just after the First World War.�