ON HER SHOULDERS: "The Discovery" by Frances Sheridan

New Perspectives Theatre Company presents the next reading in our ON HER SHOULDERS program, introducing women playwrights from the past to contemporary audiences.

Attendance is by Donation (suggested $10)

directed Malini Singh McDonald, dramaturgy by Niranjani Reddi

Thursday, December 5, 2024

with: Shreya Ambatti, Andres Chulisi Rodriguez, Marie Elena O'Brien, Nanya-Akuki Goodrich, Natasha Jain, Steven Michael Martin, Kevin McKelvy*, Amanda Montoni, Nicholas Radu-Blackburn

Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan (1724 -1766), celebrated novelist and playwright, is remembered today primarily as the mother of famed playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She was, however, a talented and influential writer in her own right, highly regarded by Dr. Johnson, James Boswell, Samuel Richardson and David Garrick, and a literary matriarch whose descendants included three generations of popular playwrights, novelists and poets.

In 1747 she married Thomas Sheridan, the popular young actor and manager of the Theatre Royal, Smock-Alley, Dublin. When Smock-Alley was nearly destroyed in 1754 during a political riot, the Sheridan family’s finances were ruined also. Frances Sheridan began her writing career after she and her husband settled in London following the Smock-Alley disaster. The Sheridans, particularly Frances, who was renowned for her wit and charm, became friends with Dr. Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Catherine Macauley. Indeed, these luminaries seem to have received Thomas mainly out of regard for Frances.

In 1762 Sheridan began work on her first play, The Discovery, which David Garrick read and immediately requested for staging at Drury Lane. The play was an immediate hit. It played for seventeen packed performances its first season.

Frances Sheridan wrote two other plays, The Dupe (1763) and the unproduced A Journey to Bath, which has survived only in a fragment. The Dupe was removed from the stage after only three performances. The play had much greater success in its published form and earned Sheridan a significant profit. Her last play, A Journey to Bath, failed to find favor with Garrick, but one of its characters, Mrs. Tryfort, a pretentious mangler of the English language, is clearly “borrowed” by Frances Sheridan’s son Richard and transformed into his famed Mrs. Malaprop.

In 1764, increasing debts drove Thomas Sheridan to move with his wife and three eldest children to France. Lame from infancy, Frances Sheridan had been plagued with poor health for ten years, and, although energetic and spirited to the last, in 1766 her maladies took a turn for the worse and she suddenly died

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

New Perspectives Theatre Company, 458 West 37th Street, New York, United States