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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.

Ten Chimneys and The Milwaukee Rep Present “The Play’s the Thing”

September 01, 2009

On Monday, August 31st, Ten Chimneys and the Milwaukee Rep presented Ferenc Molnár’s entertaining play The Play’s the Thing, featuring the Rep’s 2009/2010 Intern Company. It was the first opportunity to see these emerging talents together onstage – and it was truly delightful.

Ferenc Molnár is best known as the playwright who penned the Lunts’ first starring vehicle – the smash hit comedy The Guardsman. (Also the Lunts’ only feature film together.) Molnár’s 1926 comedy, The Play’s the Thing, features an engaging cast of characters who find themselves as a literal cast of characters in this play-within-a-play, which blithely blurs the line between reality and illusion.

Play Readings at Ten Chimneys takes audiences back to the “Golden Age of Radio” as the Rep interns recreate the plays made famous by “the golden couple of Broadway,” Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The next Play Reading will be Hay Fever on Monday, October 5th at 7:00 p.m. Hailed as one of Noël Coward’s comic masterpieces, Hay Fever — written in three days after Coward and the Lunts spent a riotous weekend with Laurette Taylor and J. Hartley Manners — was one of Sir Noël’s first successful plays, and is still staged often around the world.

Play Readings at Ten Chimneys are presented at the Lunt-Fontanne Program Center in Genesee Depot, WI. Admission is $15 in advance, or $20 at the door. Calls to reserve space are requested at (262) 968-4110.

About Ferenc Molnár
By most accounts, Ferenc Molnár, the Hungarian playwright, novelist, director, and journalist, whose reputation “reached its peak between the wars,” lived a complicated life. Born in 1878 into a well-to-do Jewish family, Molnár dabbled in journalism and then law before publishing his first novel at the age of twenty-two and his first play the following year. The play that introduced Molnár to an American audience was The Devil, which, in 1908 was playing in four theatre companies in New York at the same time, one production completely in German. The play that introduced Molnár to the Lunts in 1924 was their first onstage pairing as a leading man and a leading lady in the play that was to become the Lunts’ only feature film, The Guardsman.

Molnár’s tumultuous private life often served as the cornerstone for the playwright’s plots. Acknowledging the autobiography behind his work, Molnár firmly believed that “the better disguised these confessions are, the more honest they will be.” And so Molnár confessed his fascination with a young actress in the aforementioned The Devil and used what began as a crushing scenario with his third wife as the inspiration for the plot of The Play’s the Thing.

After two publicly unsuccessful marriages, Molnár wed the actress Lily Darvas, and settled into what he thought was a comfortable life until he overheard Lily expressing her undying love and devotion to a German tutor who had been working with her while she and Molnár were staying in Vienna. Distraught and nearly inconsolable, Molnár confronted the couple and came to discover that what he had overheard was actually his wife reading a German play. Recognizing the theatrical potential in this near marital complication, Molnár once again pulled a page from his life and turned this encounter into what was to become “the self-assured centerpiece of his career.” The Play’s the Thing premiered on Broadway in 1926.

During his lifetime, the Hungarian playwright penned more than 40 plays, some of which became recognizable American films: Liliom, linked to Molnár’s short-lived first marriage, was adapted into the musical Carousel; Olympia became the film A Breath of Scandal starring Sophia Loren; and four years after his death, Molnár’s The Swan was made into a 1956 film famous for being Grace Kelly’s last movie, released the year she married Prince Rainier. Molnár’s plays have been described as “clever, gay, bantering, seemingly light but flashing unexpectedly beneath the surface and leaving the audience with a definite impression of brilliance and truth.” This truth of Molnár’s life became the plots of his work, and now it seems the plots of his work have given a new generation of audiences the truths behind Molnár’s life.

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