The Eve of St. Mark a benefit at The Hermitage for One Night Only

Maxwell Anderson's play The Eve of St. Mark, will be presented as a staged reading at the Hermitage Museum on Saturday, April 27th at 7:30pm. Admission to this benefit is $20. For reservations call 201-445-8311.

Visit The Hermitage's web site.

Maxwell Anderson's 1942 play, the World War II drama, The Eve of St. Mark, will be presented by First Flight, which presented staged readings last May of Anderson’s historical drama Valley Forge and more recently The Love Letters of John and Abigail Adams by Frank Farrell this past March.

Richard Width directs a cast of 12 professional actors in this one night only benefit for The Hermitage: Sean Anglin, Daniel Robert Burns, Ken Dillon, Claudia Egli, Alexa Elmy, Karen Eterovich, Frank Farrell, Ethan Jones, Zander Kirby, Jeff Miller, Julio Ramon and Eric Schuster.

St. Mark's Eve is the day before the feast day of St. Mark the Evangelist. In liturgical Christian churches, this feast of St. Mark is observed on April, 25 of each year; thus St. Mark's Eve is today April 24. It was the custom in villages in England, from the 17th century to the late 19th century, to sit in the church porch on St. Mark's Eve. Those sitting had to keep silent between the bell tolling at 11.00 p.m. until the bell struck 1.00 a.m. In Yorkshire it was necessary to keep vigil for three successive nights. On the third such sitting, it was said that the ghosts of those to die during the year would be witnessed passing into the church. This practice took place throughout England, but was most prevalent in northern and western counties.

Maxwell Anderson's play The Eve of St. Mark was inspired by the playwright's personal loss of a family member in the miltary in the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, by the folklore mentioned above and the John Keats poem The Eve of St. Mark.