Public-domain ebook
Plays for small stages
by Mary Aldis
Language: en274 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Plays/Films/Dramas·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #76537.
The opening · free to read
There are two rules posted in the Green Room:
KEEP YOUR TEMPER AND RETURN YOUR MANUSCRIPTS.
The second is imperative, the first variable in application.
In selecting plays we have departed radically from the amateur tradition of resuscitating “plays with a punch,” which have fared well in the hands of professionals. In the established “tricks of the trade” of course the amateur cannot compete with the professional. This is the true significance of the well-known Green Room hoot that “The worst professional is better than the best amateur.”
We generally try to give our audiences something they have not heard before, and seek plays in which the expressed word, the mental attitude and the interplay of character are of more importance than the physical action. Here, if anywhere, although such plays may seem difficult, lies the amateur’s opportunity. So we are not afraid of plays with little action and much talk, for is not the most intense drama of all, the drama of the soul, the struggle between mind and mind, heart and heart? There lies all the pain, the joy, the perplexity of life. It is in talk, low and intense, gay and railing, bitter and despairing, as the case may be, that we moderns carry on our drama of life, the foundation for the drama of the stage.
MARY ALDIS.
Lake Forest, Illinois. July, 1915.
Mrs. Pat and the Law
Played for the first time on September 14, 1913, by Mr. BENJAMIN CARPENTER, Mrs. ARTHUR ALDIS, Miss POLLY CHASE, Miss ISABEL MCBIRNEY, and Mr. CHAS. ATKINSON.
MRS. PAT AND THE LAW.
Characters:
PATRICK O’FLAHERTY. NORA O’FLAHERTY, his wife. JIMMIE, his crippled son, aged about eight or ten years. MISS CARROLL, the Visiting Nurse. JOHN BING, a Policeman.
SCENE: A small, poor room in a tenement flat. Cook-stove, back; shabby lounge, front; at left, kitchen table with a faded flower in a bottle; a wash-tub on bench, centre left, back near door. At left, door to bedroom. At right, door to hallway.
When the curtain rises NORA O’FLAHERTY is discovered at the wash-tub. She is a large woman, with a worn, sweet face, across her forehead an ugly red cut. The room is untidy, and so is NORA. The stove is blazing hot. After stirring the clothes in the boiler NORA wipes her face with the back of her hand and sighs wearily as she puts a fresh lot into the tub of suds.
JIMMIE.
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