031. Artistic Director: Jonathan Bank

The Breakdown with Robbie

JONATHAN BANK (Producing Artistic Director) has been the artistic director of Mint Theater Company since 1995, where he has unearthed and produced dozens of lost or neglected plays, many of which he has also directed. As Variety put it in 2007, “Bank is one of the few artistic directors for whom taking an old, obscure book off the shelf is an enterprise exciting enough to be addictive.”

Under Bank’s leadership the Mint has earned an international reputation as the source for high-quality revivals of forgotten works and has become, in the words of The New York Times’ Jason Zinoman, “the leading New York entrepreneur” of the neglected play business. In his review of Mint’s 2018 production of Conflict by Miles Malleson, Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal described Jonathan Bank as “one of a handful of theater artists in America whose name is an absolute guarantee of quality.”

Recently for the Mint, Bank directed The Suitcase Under the Bed, Katie Roche, Temporal Powers and Wife to James Whelan—three plays by the neglected Irish playwright, Teresa Deevy. Bank spearheaded Mint’s ambitious three-year, three-play Teresa Deevy Project, dedicated to reclaiming the lost voice of “one of the most undeservedly neglected and significant Irish playwrights of the 20th century” (The Irish Times). In a feature article about the project in America Magazine, Andrew Garavel writes, “Thanks are due to Jonathan Bank and the Mint Theater for bringing such a distinctive voice from the past so satisfyingly into the present.”

Also for the Mint, Bank directed Yours Unfaithfully by Miles Malleson, The New Morality by Harold Chapin, Mary Broome by Allan Monkhouse, and Maurine Dallas Watkins’ So Help Me God! starring Emmy Award-winner Kristen Johnston. The production received four Drama Desk nominations, including Outstanding Revival and Outstanding Director. Other productions at the Mint include Lennox Robinson’s Is Life Worth Living?, the American Professional Premiere of The Fifth Column by Ernest Hemingway, The Return of the Prodigal by St. John Hankin and Susan and God by Rachel Crothers.

Jonathan both adapted and directed Arthur Schnitzler’s Far and Wide and The Lonely Way which he also co-translated (with Margaret Schaefer). These two plays were published in a volume entitled Arthur Schnitzler Reclaimed which Bank edited. He is also the editor of four additional volumes in the “Reclaimed” series (Teresa Deevy vols. 1 & 2, Harley Granville Barker, and St. John Hankin) as well as Worthy But Neglected: Plays of the Mint Theater Company which includes his adaptations of Thomas Wolfe's Welcome to Our City and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, both of which he directed, along with five other Mint rediscoveries.

Other directing credits include critically acclaimed productions of Ivanov and Othello for the National Asian American Theater Company, John Brown's Body, The Double Bass and Three Days of Rain for the Miniature Theater of Chester and The Heiress, Hobson’s Choice, Candida and Mr. Pim Passes By for the Peterborough Players. He earned his M.F.A. from Case Western Reserve University in his hometown of Cleveland, OH.

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