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Mission

Ten Chimneys Foundation’s Mission

  • Preserve and Share the buildings, furnishings, collections, and grounds of a national treasure – Ten Chimneys, the estate created by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
  • Serve as a continuing resource and powerful inspiration for theatre, the arts, and the art of living.
  • Offer public programs consistent with the Lunts’ varied interests and core values, while maintaining the integrity and intimacy of this extraordinary estate.

Ten Chimneys is a National Historic Landmark, a “Save America’s Treasures” project site, and is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. Ten Chimneys is owned by the non-profit 501(C)3 organization Ten Chimneys Foundation, Inc.

“Blithe Spirit” Play Reading

March 24, 2009

On Monday, March 23rd, the Milwaukee Rep Interns opened our spring season with a play reading of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. With a full house and loads of laughter, it was a truly entertaining evening.

If you missed out on Blithe Spirit, the interns will be back on Monday, May 4th, to read Idiot’s Delight by Robert E. Sherwood. Idiot’s Delight will be the final reading for the 2008-2009 Rep Interns – don’t miss your opportunity to hear the Rep Interns perform at Ten Chimneys! For more information on the Rep Interns, click here.

Play Readings at Ten Chimneys takes theatre goers back to the “Golden Age of Radio” and allows audiences to see and hear the next generation of actors recreate the plays made famous by “the golden couple of Broadway,” (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, of course!) Without costumes, sets or props – the Rep Interns showcase their theatrical artistry with the depth in which they bring their characters to life while reading together onstage.

About Blithe Spirit

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 found Noël Coward optimistic that the conflict would be over in a matter of months, and so he vowed not to write another play until the hostilities had ended. By May 1941, however, as the war raged on, Coward was rethinking his earlier stance. With both his London apartment and office bombed out in the Blitz and his resources running low, the playwright sought refuge in a Welsh resort and once again took up his pen.

On his first day in Portmeirion, Noël began batting about an idea for “a light comedy that had been rattling at the door of [his] mind,” and he thought it quite the time to “let it in and show it a little courtesy.” By lunch time of day one, he had settled on the title, Blithe Spirit, from a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem, “Hail to thee blithe Spirit! / Bird though never wert,” chosen character names, and created “a rough, very rough outline of the plot.” By the end of the week and five days of solid writing, Coward pulled from his typewriter the final pages and Blithe Spirit was complete.

In what seems like an impossible production schedule by today’s standards, Blithe Spirit opened at London’s Piccadilly Theatre on July 2, 1941, just six weeks after Coward completed the manuscript, and made its Broadway debut at the Morosco Theatre on November 5, 1941. Noel had invited the Lunts to star in Blithe Spirit‘s Broadway production, but both Lynn and Alfred politely declined, publicly declaring that the play didn’t need their star power – it was so good it could stand on its own.

And stand on its own it did. Blithe Spirit became Noël Coward’s longest-running comedy tallying an impressive 1,997 consecutive performances in London – “longer than the war in which it was born” – and racking up 657 performances on Broadway. Perhaps even more impressive is that over the nearly 70 years since its creation, the manuscript penned in Portmeirion was adapted for film in 1945 starring Rex Harrison, made into a musical, High Spirits, in 1964, found its way on to both television and radio with casts that included the likes of Lauren Bacall and Claudette Colbert, and is once again enjoying a revival, opening on Broadway on March 15, 2009, with theatrical heavyweights Angela Lansbury, Rupert Everett, and Christine Ebersole in the lead roles.

When asked about the speed with which he wrote Blithe Spirit, Noël Coward once replied, “I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war.” Disdaining false modesty, Coward also admitted that he knew the play was witty, he knew that it was well constructed, and he knew it would be a success. And he was right.

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