Mint Theater Company Lands 3rd Rock's Kristen Johnston

The Mint Theater Company will kick off its 2009-10 season with two Depression-era shows devoted to life upon the wicked stage, one featuring stage and screen favorite Kristen Johnston (3rd Rock From the Sun).

Is Life Worth Living? , by Irish playwright Lennox Robinson, stars real-life couple Jordan Baker and Kevin Kilner as married actors whose troupe of traveling thespians brings a bit of highfalutin’ fare (think Ibsen and Strindberg) to the seaside village of Inish. The comedy is helmed by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, and runs August 19 to October 11. Baker and Kilner’s off-Broadway credits include roles in two Pulitzer Prize-winning Off Broadway dramas: She played C in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women; he was Tom in Donald Marguiles’ Dinner With Friends.

Next, Emmy-winning former alien Johnston will return to the New York stage as the star of the All About Eve-esque So Help Me God!, penned by former Chicago Tribune reporter-turned-dramatist Maurine Dallas Watkins. (It was Watkins’ 1926 play Chicago that inspired the Kander & Ebb musical.) Johnston has appeared on Broadway in the Roundabout’s 2001 revival of The Women, and headlined The Skin of Our Teeth and Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare in the Park; she has also starred in the New Group’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Signature Theatre Company’s Baltimore Waltz and Scarcity at the Atlantic Theater. Directed by Martin Platt, So Help Me God! begins performances November 18.

The Mint has built its reputation on producing “worthy but neglected” plays by noteworthy writers. Among their past presentations: J.M. Barrie’s Echoes of the War, D.H. Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law, Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness, Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column, J.B. Priestley’s The Glass Cage.