The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays | Page 3

factitious "happy ending." With the
relentless, mighty arms of England engaged in hunting the defeated

Highlanders after the Battle of Culloden, a play like "Campbell of
Kilmhor," in which we sympathize with the ill-fated Stewarts, cannot
end happily. If they had yielded under pressure and betrayed 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