The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays | Page 3

their comrades, we might have pitied them, but we could not admire their action, and there would have been no strong conclusion. In "Riders to the Sea," where the characters are compelled by bitter poverty to face the relentless forces of storm and sea, and in "The Biding to Lithend," we expect a tragic end almost from the first lines of the play. We recognize this same dramatic tensity of hopeless conflict in many stories as well as plays; it is most powerful in three or four novels by George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy.
One of the best ways to understand these as real stage plays is through some sort of dramatization. This does not mean, however, that they need be produced with elaborate scenery and costumes, memorizing, and rehearsal; often the best understanding may be secured by quite informal reading in the class, with perhaps a hat and cloak and a lath sword or two for properties. With simply a clear space in the classroom for a stage, you and your imaginations can give all the performance necessary for realizing these plays very well indeed. But, of course, you must clearly understand the lines and the play as a whole before you try to take a part, so that you can read simply and naturally, as you think the people in the story probably spoke. Some questions for discussion in the appendix may help you in talking the plays over in class or in reading them for yourself before you try to take a part. You will find it sometimes helps, also, to make a diagram or a colored sketch of the scene as the author describes it, or even a small model of the stage for a "dramatic museum" for your school. If you have not tried this, you do not know how much it helps in seeing plays of other times, like Shakespeare's or Moliere's; and it is useful also for modern dramas. Such small stages can be used for puppet theatres as well. "The Knave of Hearts" is intended as a marionette play, and other dramas--Maeterlinck's and even Shakespeare's--have been given in this way with very interesting effects.
If you bring these plays to a performance for others outside your own class, you will find that the simplest and least pretentious settings are generally most effective. The Irish players, as Mr. Yeats tells us, "have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is little more than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and leaves of gold for a wood, a great green curtain, with a red stencil upon it to carry the eye upward, for a palace." Mr. John Merrill of the Francis Parker School describes the quite excellent results secured with a dark curtain in a semicircle--a cyclorama--for background, and with colored lights.[1] Such a staging leaves the attention free to follow the lines, and the imagination to picture whatever the play suggests as the place of the action.
[Footnote 1: John Merrill: "Drama and the School," in Drama, November, 1919.]

THE PHILOSOPHER OF BUTTERBIGGENS[1]
Harold Chapin
[Footnote 1: Included by special permission of Mrs. Alice Chapin. Permission to present this play must be secured from Samuel French, 28 West 38th Street, New York City, who controls all acting rights, etc., in this country.]
CHARACTERS
DAVID PIRNIE LIZZIE, his daughter JOHN BELL, his son-in-law ALEXANDER, John's little son
SCENE: JOHN BELL'S _tenement at Butterbiggens. It consists of the very usual "two rooms, kitchen, and bath," a concealed bed in the parlor and another in the kitchen enabling him to house his family--consisting of himself, his wife, his little son, and his aged father-in-law--therein. The kitchen-and-living-room is a good-sized square room. The right wall (our right as we look at it) is occupied by a huge built-in dresser, sink, and coal bunker, the left wall by a high-manteled, ovened, and boilered fireplace, the recess on either side of which contains a low painted cupboard. Over the far cupboard hangs a picture of a ship, but over the near one is a small square window. The far wall has two large doors in it, that on the right leading to the lobby, and that on the left appertaining to the old father-in-law's concealed bed. The walls are distempered a brickish red. The ceiling once was white. The floor is covered with bright linoleum and a couple of rag rugs--one before the fire--a large one--and a smaller one before the door of the concealed bed._
_A deal table is just to right of centre. A long flexible gas-bracket depends from the ceiling above it. Another many-jointed gas-bracket projects from the middle of the high mantelpiece, its flame turned down towards the stove. There are wooden chairs at the table, above, below, and to left of it. A high-backed easy chair is above the fire, a kitchen elbow-chair