Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Posted by Billy Christopher Maupin

We just got our first press piece about our involvement in 365 Days/365 Plays! Richmond.com's Karri Peifer has composed a really nice feature story that you can find (as of today) on Richmond.com. Judi Crenshaw, our publicist, has really dones an incredible job with getting this project visibility! She rocks my world a bit.

No need for me to keep going. I'll let you read what Ms. Peifer has to say! On to the story:

Read Richmond.com's Feature about Barksdale Theatre's production of Week 50 of 365 Days/365 Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks.

1920s Playwright Believed in Herself - and Triumphed!

Posted by Bruce Miller

We’re excited about our wonderful production of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, playing through October 28 at Barksdale Willow Lawn. If you haven’t seen it, please come. We’re proud that it is the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project.
In celebration, I’ve been researching the four remarkable women playwrights whose work made it onto Barksdale’s stage during our first decade (1953–1962). In past weeks I have profiled Nancy Mitford (see Barksdale’s First Woman Playwright – Nancy Mitford, Sept 6), Vera Caspary (see Femme Fatale / Femme Fantastique, Sept 10), and Mary Hayley Bell (see Foregoing Fame for Family, Sept 21).

Today I post the final entry in this series, as we re-discover the life and work of …

ANNE NICHOLS (1891 – 1966)

Anne Nichols was a one hit wonder. But what a hit it was. On May 23, 1922, the Broadway lights came up on Abie’s Irish Rose at the Fulton Theatre. Abie's is a whimsical family comedy about the tumult that arises among the in-laws when a stalwart Jewish American soldier and a lovely Irish American (Catholic) nurse meet and marry in France during WWI. It earned mixed reviews from the leading theatre critics of the time (Alexander Woollcott found it charming; Haywood Broun found it abominable). The public, however, seemed to be of one mind. They loved it. And I do mean LOVED it.

Abie’s Irish Rose ran on Broadway for 2,327 performances before closing on October 1, 1927, and remained the longest running play in Broadway history until its record was broken eleven years later by Tobacco Road. Today, Abie's is still the third longest running play, following Tobacco Road and Life with Father. Lorenz Hart immortalized the popularity of the show (and some sophisticates’ displeasure with that popularity) in this lyric from I’ll Take Manhattan:

“We’ll take our babies
To go see Abie’s
Irish Rose.
We hope they’ll live to see
It close.”
The Broadway hit launched 16 road companies that toured the U. S. The play was produced successfully around the world, including a musical version in Newfoundland (pictured above) and a hit production in Berlin, where it was closed only by the rising popularity of Adolf Hitler and his rabid anti-Semitism.

Abie’s was first filmed in the silent era (1928) directed by Victor Fleming (a character in our upcoming comedy about the making of Gone with the Wind - Moonlight and Magnolias), and filmed again as a talkie in 1946. It became a smash hit radio serial that ran for 2 ½ years on NBC in the pre-war 1940s, playing in over five million homes coast to coast each week. It was often referenced in the 50s and 60s by the Jewish/Irish, husband/wife comedy team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. It provided the premise for the hit 1972 TV series Bridget Loves Bernie, starring Meredith Baxter and David Birney. Despite consistently placing in the Top Five in the Neilson ratings, Bridget Loves Bernie was cancelled in response to public protest over the subject matter of inter-faith marriage. Reality soon showed just how ludicrous the protest was. The Irish and Jewish actors, Baxter and Birney, married in real life soon after their TV show was cancelled.

Long before she was dubbed by Time Magazine as "the most successful business woman in the U. S.," Anne Nichols was born into a strict Baptist family of mixed ethnic heritage (Irish and Russian) in Dales Mill, Georgia in 1891. At age 16, she ran away to Philadelphia where she found work as a singer and writer for the theatre. In 1915 she married Henry Duffey, an Irish Catholic actor and producer, and later converted to Catholicism. She never changed her name, which was highly unusual for the time.

By the early 1920s, Nichols had written several successful plays and vaudeville sketches. Abie’s Irish Rose, she later recalled, took her “three hours” or “three days” to write, depending on which article you reference. It opened in San Francisco and then Los Angeles, and proved immensely popular. Eager to bring the show east to NYC, Nichols could not find a producer willing to back the play. Her California producer, Oliver Morosco, thought the play was not sophisticated enough for New York. New York producers didn’t believe there was an audience for so far-fetched a concept as an Irish-Jewish marriage.

Refusing to accept “no” for an answer, Nichols filed suit to take control of her play away from Morosco. She moved to New York, mortgaged her house to raise $5,000, and produced the Broadway production of the play herself. She even hired herself as director, and women directors were unheard of on Broadway in the 1920s.

The production opened at the Fulton Theatre on W 46th Street (pictured to the right, originally built as the Follies Bergere, now known as the Helen Hayes). Standing bravely in the heart of the Broadway theatre district, Abie's opened with everyone except Anne Nichols expecting disaster.

But disaster was not to happen. Abie’s represented classic vaudeville ethnic humor taken to a new level to reflect second and third generation concerns and aspirations of Irish and Jewish America. Abraham Levy (Abie) met Rosemary Murphy in a hospital in France during World War I. She was working at a field hospital as a nurse when he was admitted with wounds suffered while serving as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Despite their religious differences, they fall in love and get married (by a Baptist minister).

When Abie brings Rosemary home to meet his father Solomon, a very traditional Jew eager to see his son marry within his faith, he introduces her as a “friend” named Rosemary Murpheski. The ruse does not last very long and Solomon eventually discovers the truth. To placate his father (a widower), Abie agrees to have a second wedding ceremony performed by a rabbi. Just as the ceremony is about to take place, Rosemary’s father (also a widower) arrives with Catholic priest (Father Whalen) in tow.

In an earlier era, a scene so fraught with tension and stock ethnic characters would have quickly disintegrated into a melee. (Decades later, such culture clash would result in the "very Richmond" pleasures of O'Briensteins. Remember?) But this was the 1920s and Anne Nichols was aiming her play at a middle-class American audience (Irish, Jewish, or otherwise) that frowned on intolerance. Broadway, in other words, was a long way from the Bowery and the scene is resolved amicably as the rabbi and priest recognize each other from their service in World War I. American patriotism and open mindedness win the day as they recount ministering to soldiers of all faiths.

“Shure they all had the same God above them,” observed Father Whalen. “And what with the shells bursting, and the shrapnel flying, with no one knowing just what moment death would come, Catholics, Hebrews and Protestants alike all forgot their prejudice and came to realize that all faiths and creeds have about the same destination after all.”

Even though Father Whalen performs a third wedding ceremony to make matters right in the eyes of the Catholic church, Abie and Rosemary remain at odds with their fathers until a Christmas dinner (with Kosher food for the Levys) at which the couple present their newborn twins – a girl named Rebecca (for Abie’s mother) and a boy named Patrick (for Rosemary’s father).

True to form, Abie’s was a big hit at Barksdale when Pete and Muriel selected it for their 1960 season, starring Joseph Lowenthal as Abie and Sandy Wade as Rosemary. Harold Goldman played Solomon Levy (the father), Bill Rothenberg played the Rabbi, and Louis Steinberg played the neighbor, Mr. Cohen. (Any relation, JB?)

Abie's opened shortly after the real life wedding of Pete Kilgore and Nancy Masters Kilgore, and almost immediately following the opening of Barksdale’s first Workshop Theatre, a tiny performance space carved out of the downstairs of the Annex. And what was the first production in Barksdale's new Workshop Theatre? The Diary of Anne Frank.

Anne Nichols made many millions by betting on herself and on the simple humanity of Abie’s Irish Rose. She died from a heart attack in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, at the age of 75, never again writing anything to equal the mega-hit of her youth.

--Bruce Miller

So this Pulitzer Prize Winner Woke Up One Day and Decided to Write a Play Every Day for a Year...

Posted by Billy Christopher Maupin

Back in November of 2002, Suzan-Lori Parks (the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of Topdog/Underdog, In the Blood, Venus, and F------ A) decided that she would write a play, every day, for a year. Now, remember the last time you woke and said, "[insert unrealistic goal here]." Remember when that didn't really happen? Well the really cool thing about Suzan-Lori's goal is...she actually did it!!!

Now, there is a nationwide festival--well, a movement really--to produce all 365 of these plays all over the country. Participating theatres or individuals present a week of plays (seven plays) during the week that they were written (along with "The 3 Constants"...but more about that later).

Barksdale Theatre (I'm so ecstatic about this) is presenting "Week 50" on October 22nd at 8PM on the Barksdale Willow Lawn lobby stage. A cash bar will be available. It's another component of our ongoing Women's Theatre Project.

Cost is...well...at the requirement of Suzan-Lori Parks, Pay-What-You-Will. So come be part of making American theatre history. Throw some cash in the jar and take in some of the most stimulating, fascinating, and often quite hilarious (I mean REALLY hilarious) theatre one is likely to experience.

More to come...

--Billy Christopher Maupin

Foregoing Fame for Family

Posted by Bruce Miller
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers opens tonight as the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project. In celebration, I’ve been researching the four remarkable women playwrights whose work made it onto our stage during Barksdale’s first decade (1953 – 1962). Two weeks ago, I profiled Nancy Mitford (see Barksdale’s First Woman Playwright – Nancy Mitford, Sept 6), and last week we explored the life of playwright and social activist Vera Caspary (see Femme Fatale / Femme Fantastique, Sept 10).

Today I introduce you to a third woman author whose relative anonymity today is emblematic of the challenges faced by women playwrights in the mid-1900s. This remarkable woman was a first-rate actress on the international stage, and the author of two smash hit plays and a novel that inspired a classic film. She was the lifelong wife of one of the world’s greatest actors, and the mother of a film star who became Hollywood’s reigning adolescent icon in the 1960s. Like Vera Caspary, this author wrote a story that was later "musical-ized" by one of the world’s foremost theatre composers—in her case, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Can’t guess who this forgotten woman author is? Allow me to introduce you to …

MARY HAYLEY BELL (1911 – 2005)

The daughter of a well-to-do British official in the Chinese customs service, Mary Hayley Bell was born in Shanghai in 1911. She spent her childhood in the Far East, moving at an early age to Tientsin, China (now Tianjin). When she was nine, she began writing plays, most of them focusing on a person challenged by physical or mental disabilities. “I don’t know why,” she later said, “but I suppose they were heroes to me.”

As a teenager, she met a young actor named John Mills. Mills was just beginning his career in a touring company known as the Quaints. When the Quaints toured to Tientsin, Colonel Francis Haley Bell, Mary Hayley’s father, hosted a tennis party for the touring British actors at his home. Mills met the Colonel’s daughter only briefly. He later remembered her as “the ball-boy with flaming red hair.” (She was a strawberry blond.) She later remembered him as “the young man I rescued from the courts when he became incapacitated by my father’s lethal punch.”

Mills went on his way, and Mary Hayley Bell eventually returned to England to be educated at Malvern Girls’ College and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. When her father lost nearly all his money in misguided Far Eastern business ventures, she had to fend for herself, and set out to become an actress. She was cast in an American touring production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1932. As fate would have it, her first touring performance was in Shanghai.

She was awarded her first London role in 1934 in the popular West End comedy Vintage Wine, a role she would later recreate on film. This was followed by other West End roles, a tour of Australia, and a Broadway debut in 1939.

Later that year, Mary Hayley Bell and John Mills were both working again on the London stage. As he was making an early exit alone one night from a party, he bumped into “a beautiful girl with red hair” stepping out of the elevator. He recognized Bell at once, and “offered to escort her down the corridor and back to the party.”

Mills was at the time working his way out of an unhappy early marriage. Mary Hayley Bell was on the rebound from an ill-conceived Australian engagement. Their relationship blossomed quickly. Just before WWII, Mills enlisted and the two sweethearts staged the mock “illicit weekend” that was required to gain Mills’ British divorce.

They were married in 1941 while Mills was on a 48-hour leave. Despite initial hardships during the war, their marriage lasted 64 years, turning out to be one of the longest, closest and happiest unions in show business. Mary Hayley Bell decided to give up acting for marriage and motherhood. The young couple had three children, Juliet, Hayley and Johnathan. Both of the Mills’ daughters became notable actresses, Juliet starring on American television in the hit 60s series, Nanny and the Professor, and Hayley becoming an international star by age 14, and Disney’s favorite heroine in films including Pollyanna (pictured to the right) and The Parent Trap.

When Mary Haley Bell gave up acting, she took up playwriting. “It was something I could do,” she said, “while staying home and looking after my children.” She penned four hit dramas, three of which became star vehicles for her husband: Men in Shadow (1942), Duet for Two Hands (1945), Angel (1945), and The Uninvited Guest (1953). Men in Shadow was so authentic in its depiction of French resistance fighters trapped behind enemy lines that the war censors at MI5 required Bell to make certain cuts so as to not give away classified secrets. The play was a smash hit in London, with simultaneous hit productions running in Moscow and New York.

Duet for Two Hands (the play that Barksdale produced in 1959, starring Pete Kilgore with his hair dyed blond) was an even bigger success. Delving into those dark realms of the imagination that had fascinated Ms Bell since adolescence, Duet told the story of a maimed young poet onto whom were transplanted the hands of a murderer. Duet was London’s biggest hit during the post-war years, and transferred to Broadway before making its way to Hanover Tavern.

In 1961, Mary Hayley Bell wrote her first novel, Whistle Down the Wind. It was immediately made into what has become one of England’s most cherished films (starring a young Hayley Mills alongside Alan Bates). Decades later, Whistle was adapted into a major musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lloyd Webber’s revival of his version of Whistle Down the Wind will be playing Chrysler Hall in Norfolk in the winter of 2008.

After a lifelong and legendary acting career (winning an Oscar for Ryan’s Daughter in 1970), John Mills became Sir John Mills (and Mary Haley Bell became Lady Mills) sometime in the 1970s. They lived happily and scandal-free well into their 90s. Mills died in 2004, and less than six months later, Mary Hayley Bell died in 2005.

She achieved international success as an author and actress, but Mary Hayley Bell regarded her greatest triumphs to involve her family. She expressed little regret and a great deal of pride when, later in life, she was recognized mostly as John Mills’ wife and Hayley Mills’ mother.

--Bruce Miller

Femme Fatale / Femme Fantastique

Posted by Bruce Miller

As we prepare to open The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project, I’m revisiting the four remarkable women playwrights whose work made it onto the Barksdale stage between 1953 and 1962. Last week I profiled Nancy Mitford (see Barksdale’s First Woman Playwright – Nancy Mitford, Sept. 6). This week, I introduce to you a second woman author who is now remembered as a feminist pulp fiction pioneer and the author of the glitzy showbiz story of Cole Porter’s final musical for film or stage.

VERA CASPARY (1899 – 1987)

It took help from my pal Jackie Jones and the Boston Public Library to find the handsome photo of Vera Caspary that is pictured to the right. And then it cost me $20! But it's worth it to know that Ms Caspary will now show up on Google Images for the first time because of this blog.

Unlike Diana Mitford, Vera Caspary wasn’t famously wealthy, glamorous or socially connected. Yet she danced around the edges of some of the more important events and celebrated people of her time, and emerged as one of the most progressive and successful woman authors of the 20th Century.

Vera Caspary was born in Chicago in 1899. She grew up in a middle class neighborhood next door to Ferdinand Barnett, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and their four children. Mr. Barnett was a lawyer and the founder of Chicago’s first black newspaper. Ms Wells-Barnett (pictured to the left) was a nationally prominent journalist and anti-lynching activist.

A former slave, Ms Wells-Barnett was sought out as an impassioned speaker for civil rights, both in the United States and abroad. She founded the first African American suffragist organization, and was a founding member of the “Committee of 40,” a group of national activists that evolved into the NAACP. Within two years of joining she left the Committee because she felt they were not revolutionary enough.

Vera Caspary was completely taken with her next door neighbors and their progressive politics. At the age of 17, Ms Caspary left high school, took a secretarial course and began earning her living writing advertising copy. She soon felt unfulfilled by this position, and turned her attentions to writing fiction addressing serious social themes.

Her first novel, The White Girl, concerned a black woman from the South who tries to pass for white when she moves north. Her second novel, Thicker than Water, focused on a Jewish family from Chicago. Her first play, Blind Mice, told the story of Chicago’s young working women who lived together in Rolfe House, the low income residence where she herself resided. Blind Mice was not commercially successful, but it took Ms Caspary to Broadway just as she was entering her 30s.

Paramount optioned Blind Mice, reset it in New York City, and filmed it as Working Girl in 1931. (A still from the film is pictured to the right.) Clearly ahead of its time, Working Girl is a subversively funny film laced with an ironic view of marriage, work and class. Film scholar Judith Mayne calls it "perhaps the most daring and innovative film Arzner (the film's acclaimed woman director) ever made." Using this as her calling card to Hollywood, Ms Caspary next wrote the story and the screenplay for The Night of June 13th, a romantic murder mystery of sorts that became her first real commercial success.

In many of her books, especially those from the late '30s, Ms Caspary's heroines were career women, or women attempting to juggle romance and independence, very similar to her own situation. In 1943, Ms Caspary’s career took a giant leap forward when she wrote the novel Laura, which was licensed by 20th Century Fox and turned into a movie by producer and director Otto Preminger. Laura marked a return to the hard-boiled romantic mystery genre of her first success. The novel and the movie were so popular that Ms Caspary soon thereafter co-authored with George Sklar a stage version for Broadway. The play was a hit in both New York and London. It was this stage version of Laura that was produced by Barksdale in 1958, starring Burt Edwards, Bernard Schutte, Jay Lundy, Pete Kilgore, Helen Jervey and Muriel McAuley.

Laura had several elements that seemed to come from Ms Caspary's life. The heroine, Laura Hunt, works as a secretary at an advertising agency, but has some daring and ambition. With some unexpected help from columnist Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb in the film, pictured in the bathtub above and to the right), she becomes a top executive. At the same time, Laura is forced to balance her professional and personal life, a situation with potentially lethal consequences. In the 1940s and still today, the character of Laura was and is the "quintessential femme fatale."

Shortly after the success of Laura, Ms Caspary co-authored the screen adaptation of her hard-hitting feminist crime novel, Bedelia, which was filmed by John Corfield and Isadore Goldsmith, an Austrian-born producer who became Ms Caspary's husband. Bedelia is considered by many to be the original "black widow" crime story. In 1948, she wrote the screenplay for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's movie, A Letter to Three Wives, which was another huge hit for the studio.

In 1950, the right-wing journal Counterattack issued a pamphlet-style book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Because of her commitment to Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the early civil rights movement, her authorship of several plays and novels dealing progressively with women’s and other social issues, and her marriage to a left-leaning Austrian who left his homeland to oppose the Nazis, Ms Caspary was included among the 151 actors, writers and other arts professionals identified in Red Channels as communist sympathizers. No evidence against her was ever asked for or collected, nonetheless, being named in Red Channels effectively placed Ms Caspary on the Hollywood blacklist.

During the years of the blacklist, she continued to write crime novels with strong women at their center. She also wrote a story about three gorgeous showgirls and the man who connected them with each other.

In the late 50s, Gene Kelly expressed interest in making a movie musical based on this story. Cole Porter (pictured to the left) was asked to write the score. This was to be Cole Porter’s last musical for film or stage. (He wrote Aladdin for television one year later.) The musical film was called Les Girls, or Cole Porter’s Les Girls in the United States. It included the Porter standard, Ca C’est L’Amour. This was the haunting love song that, decades later, Muriel, Randy Strawderman and Jim Bianchi picked for Bricktop to sing to Cole in Act II of Red Hot and Cole.

Today, Ms Caspary’s hard-boiled and yet romantic crime novels (such as Laura and Bedelia) are still in print and selling better than ever. New generations grant these classics considerable acclaim as early examples of feminist pulp fiction. Their paperback covers today (see Bedelia to the right) are reminiscent of 1940s Sam Spade. Also, the Academy Award-winning Les Girls was recently released on DVD as an example of the final years of MGM’s reign as the world's foremost producer of entertaining musicals. Outshining Gene Kelly, the real stars are the film's three leading femmes fantastique: Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg and Kay Kendall.

We will be selling these works of Vera Caspary along with the works of our other featured women authors in the lobby throughout the run of The Member of the Wedding. Her classic works are as fresh today as they were in the 40s, and are well worth your consideration.

--Bruce Miller

Barksdale's First Woman Playwright - Nancy Mitford

Posted by Bruce Miller
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers is the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project. In honor of this important initiative, I’ll be profiling over the next few weeks the four remarkable women playwrights who were the first to make it onto the Barksdale stage. Their plays were produced in Barksdale's first decade – 1953 through 1962.

During that time, Barksdale produced 55 mainstage productions, but only four of the plays were written by women. The authors were Nancy Mitford, Vera Caspary, Mary Hayley Bell, and Anne Nichols. You may or may not recognize their names, but I’m certain you’ll be fascinated by their stories. Their strong-willed, many-faceted lives were emblematic of women playwrights in general during the middle years of the 20th Century.

NANCY MITFORD (1904 – 1973)

Nancy Mitford was Barksdale’s first woman playwright. She wrote the English adaptation of The Little Hut (based on La petite hutte, a popular French comedy by Andre Roussin). The Little Hut is the most frequently produced play in Barksdale’s history. Pete, Muriel and Nancy LOVED The Little Hut, producing it in 1957, 58, 59, 64 and 78.

The Little Hut is Nancy Mitford’s only stage play, but she was a prolific and popular British novelist and biographer. The original production ran for two years in Paris; Ms. Mitford’s English adaptation ran for three years in London, becoming a huge British hit. In 1953, it flopped on Broadway. In 1956, it was made into a poorly received film starring Ava Gardner, David Niven and Stewart Granger.

The story of The Little Hut concerns an independent, self-sufficient woman from Britain’s aristocracy who is stranded after a shipwreck on a deserted island with her husband and her lover. Soon thereafter, she becomes the object of the affections of a primal island native as well. When the aristocratic manners and primitive aggressions of all the men come to naught, it is the woman who must figure out how to save the day.

Nancy Mitford herself was born into the British aristocracy in 1904. She was the first of six daughters of Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale (pictured to the right), who lived with Lady Redesdale at the family estate in Oxfordshire. Despite their pedigree (and inherited fortune), Lord and Lady Redesdale were uneducated and made no effort to educate their beautiful daughters. “We girls were taught only to ride and to speak French,” Nancy Mitford wrote. “I grew up as ignorant as an owl, came out in London, and went to a great many balls.”

Relentlessly pursuing self-education, Ms. Mitford became a tireless reader and soon joined the society ranks referred to by Evelyn Waugh as the “Bright Young Things” of the London social scene between the wars.

Nancy Mitford’s parents were fiercely conservative, and supported the British Union of Fascists. After WWI, the Baron purchased a Canadian mining operation and named it The Swastika Gold Mine. Three of the notorious Mitford sisters followed in their parents’ footsteps. Diana Mitford married the British Blackshirt leader Sir Oswald Mosley, and the couple (pictured to the left at a Nazi rally in Germany) was very friendly with Adolph Hitler. In 1940, Diana was interned at Croydon Airport on her way to Germany. An affectionately autographed photo of the Fuhrer was found in her luggage.

The German wedding of a second sister, Unity Mitford, was secretly held in the office of propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and Hitler was among the guests. When Hitler declared war against England, Unity attempted suicide, stating that Hitler had personally promised her that the declaration would never take place. (The photo to the right shows Unity and Diana partying with SS soldiers in Nuremberg.)

A third sister, Pamela Mitford, was also a Nazi sympathizer. (In the photo to the left, she's the Mitford sister on top.) Recently released pre-war records from MI5 indicate that it was Nancy Mitford herself (our playwright) who informed the British authorities about her three fascist sisters. “My sister Pamela and her husband Derek Jackson,” Nancy wrote in her report to the British government, “have been heard to declare that all Jews in England should be killed and that the war should be stopped now before we lose any more money.”

Nancy Mitford was a moderate socialist and an English patriot, and her sister Jessica was an outspoken communist. They despaired over the family’s fascism and treasonous activities. They both became noted writers, Nancy in England and France and Jessica in the U. S.

Nancy Mitford is best known for her comic novels affectionately satirizing upper-class life in England and France. Her two most popular books are The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which were combined to make a BBC television serial in 2002. Later in her life, Ms. Mitford wrote popular biographies and histories. Even three decades after her death, she is still a beloved British writer, and most of her books remain in print today.

Ms. Mitford’s first romantic relationship was with the homosexual Scottish aristocrat Hamish St Clair-Erskine. She later married Peter Rodd, the youngest son of the 1st Baron Rennell, supposedly a one-time lover of Oscar Wilde. Although they remained friendly throughout their lifetimes, the Rodds separated in the late 30s, and eventually divorced in 1958.

During WWII, Ms. Mitford found the love of her life in a French soldier and politician, Colonel Gaston Palewski, Charles de Gaulle’s Chief of Staff (pictured to the left). At the end of the war, Ms. Mitford moved to Paris to be near “The Colonel.” Her somewhat unrequited devotion did not end until 1969 when Palewski married a beautiful American railroad heiress.

In 1972, as governments became aware of her illness, Ms. Mitford was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer in the French Legion of Honor. Palewski was asked to invest her with her French title during the formal ceremonies. He was also at her bedside on the day she died.

Ms. Mitford’s books are still beloved, and we will have copies on sale in the Barksdale lobby during the run of The Member of the Wedding. We hope you will check out the timeless work of Nancy Mitford--an outstanding author and Barksdale’s first woman playwright.

--Bruce Miller

Barksdale's Women's Theatre Project

Posted by Bruce Miller

As I begin my seventh season as Barksdale’s Artistic Director, the question I’m asked most frequently is, “How do you decide which plays to produce?” The process has so many layers (and so many players) it requires its own publication.

Part of the answer, however, involves a key commitment we made when we began selecting our first Barksdale Season in 2001-02. We pledged to ourselves, our artists and our audiences that we would, each season, produce at least:
· one work by a woman author,
· one work staged by a woman director, and
· one work that focuses on a strong, central woman.

We call this commitment our Women’s Theatre Project. The Member of the Wedding by the brilliant and legendary Southern author, Carson McCullers (pictured below and to the right), will open our Signature Season at Willow Lawn on September 21. It is a part of this Project.

At first glance, the commitment seems hardly necessary. What theatre wouldn’t, without even trying, produce such a season? And yet, if you review Barksdale’s history prior to 2001 and Richmond theatre history in general up to today, you’ll find that the majority of seasons fail to meet these minimal standards.

In the last seven seasons, we’re proud to have selected 15 plays and musicals by women authors. Several of these productions have been among our biggest hits, including The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, Annie Get Your Gun co-written by Dorothy Fields, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Crowns by Regina Taylor, and Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage—to mention only a few.

We’re proud that sixteen of our plays and musicals have been directed by leading women artists, including Robin Arthur, Nancy Cates, Jan Guarino, Leslie Owens Harrington, Susan Sanford, K Strong, Dawn Westbrook and Keri Wormald.

We’re proud of the powerful starring roles performed on our stage by Kathy Halenda, Dorothy Holland, Kelly Kennedy, Liz Mamana, Adanma Onyedike, Robyn O’Neill, Jill Bari Steinberg, Erin Thomas, Harriet Traylor and Irene Ziegler (to name a few), setting a standard for strong, active images of women.

In The Member of the Wedding, actress Katherine Louis (pictured to the left) and playwright Carson McCullers will join this roll of honor. We hope you’ll recognize, appreciate and support the commitments of our Women’s Theatre Project.

Throughout the run of Wedding, we will be exploring the issue of Women and the Arts in our Coffee & Conversations series, our new Cocktail Hour Conversations program, and here on the blog. Please join us in the discussion.

--Bruce Miller