In 1913, five years after he had moved to London, D. H. Lawrence was a schoolteacher in Croydon with two little-read novels and two unproduced plays to his credit. Turning further towards drama, he poured memories of life in coal country in Nottinghamshire and his socially mismatched parents’ dynamics into another play, The Daughter-in-Law, but it was never performed, nor even published, in his lifetime. That’s a shame. The play is plangent and finely drawn, a deeply imagined attempt to limn all of the interconnected woes of a life of Vicwardian poverty. The Mint Theater Company, which specializes in the neglected and the forgotten, staged a well-received New York debut in 2003 and revived the work at City Center Stage II in February and March this winter.

The playbill included a glossary that proved to be critical to comprehension: the entire play is written in a difficult, sometimes opaque East Midlands dialect, and the cast members speak in an accent that my ears found difficult to pierce, at least in the early going. (“Tha pleases thysen. Tha can sleep by thysen for iver, if ter’s a mind to’t.”)

Reading the play would be more challenging than seeing it performed, though. Gradually, the audience learns via context such words