02/22/2022
Join us this Thursday for Jonathan Bank's lecture: "Exploding the Dramatic Canon."
This lecture is free and open to all. No registration is required. UCLA COVID-19 restrictions prevent us from providing refreshments.
Jonathan Bank has been Producing Artistic Director of the Mint Theater Company in New York City since 1996. He likes to say he’s not from academia, he’s from Cleveland. Under his leadership, the Mint has specialized in producing plays, mostly from the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, that were artistically excellent and initially popular, but that have been more or less forgotten. Mr. Bank has been able to find such plays with remarkable consistency and the quality of the Mint’s productions is widely acclaimed. One critic wrote, “We are lucky in New York to have the Mint here. If all they did was find and stage these plays, it would be enough, but what they do is reincarnate them into striking works of art.” The Mint has won an Obie grant, a special Drama Desk award, and the Theater History Museum’s Theater Presentation Award. Mr. Bank has also said:
“I want to do old-fashioned plays that people never heard of. I’m extremely interested in the structure of the well-made play and why they’ve become neglected. After I did a few of them, that in itself fascinated me—the number of plays that are worth producing that, somehow, never are.”
In this lecture, he will discuss how and why he discovers and produces such plays, and with what results.
