The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays Part 80

CALIBAN BY THE YELLOW SANDS: A masque for the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration, New York City.

Doubleday.

JEANNE D'ARC: A tragedy made up of incidents in the life of the Maid.

Macmillan.

SAM AVERAGE: A Silhouette. A soldier of 1812 is kept true to the cause by a vision of Sam Average, the spirit of his nation.

In Yankee Fantasies, Duffield.

THE SCARECROW: A lively dramatization of Hawthorne's Feathertop, from Mosses from an Old Manse.

Macmillan.

+Mary MacMillan+

THE SHADOWED STAR: Portraying the cruel suffering of two Irish peasant women who wait in a city tenement for Christmas as they remember it.

In Short Plays, Stewart and Kidd.

+Maurice Maeterlinck+

ARDIANE AND BLUEBEARD: A resolute wife finally defies Bluebeard and rescues his wives; but they refuse to forsake their unfortunate and beloved husband.

Dodd, Mead.

A MIRACLE OF SAINT ANTHONY

THE INTRUDER; THE DEATH OF TINTAGILES; INTERIOR (OR HOME):

Poignant and mystical tragedies expressing the unseen and inescapable forces surrounding and closing in upon men's lives.

Boni and Liveright; Dodd, Mead.

THE BLUE BIRD: Two peasant children, accompanied by their friends Dog, Cat, Bread, Sugar, and others, search everywhere for the blue bird of happiness. They visit among other places the realms of the dead, where their grandparents are, and of the unborn.

Finally they look in the last and likeliest place.

Dodd, Mead.

THE BETROTHAL: Further adventures of Tytyl.

Dodd, Mead.

+John Masefield+

PHILIP THE KING; TRAGEDY OF POMPEY THE GREAT:

High tragedies. The great Pompey, defeated by the upstart Ceesar, is kingly to the end.

Sidgwick and Jackson, London; Macmillan, New York.

THE SWEEPS OF NINETY-EIGHT: A fugitive from an unsuccessful rebellion achieves a sweeping revenge upon the leaders of the enemy; amusing comedy.

Macmillan.

THE TRAGEDY OF NAN: One of the most poignantly tragic of modern plays; the mercilessness of weak and selfish people crushes out a beautiful life.

Richards, London.

+Rutherford Mayne (J. Waddell)+

THE DRONE: An old man by playing craftily at being on the eve of a great invention lives most comfortably on his brother's means; but forces acc.u.mulate against him and he is threatened with eviction from the hive.

Luce.

+George Middleton+

THE BLACK TIE: A play of sharp and quiet suffering, presenting at a new angle the Southern cleavage of races. The negro cla.s.ses are not allowed to appear in the Sunday-school procession, and the small disappointment is typical of greater deprivations.

In Possession and other One-Act Plays, Holt.

MASKS: An author who has spoiled a good play so that it will "go"

on the stage is called upon by the angry characters, whom he created and then forced to do as they would not really have done.

In Masks and other One-Act Plays, Holt.

MOTHERS: A mother tries in vain to prevent a young woman whom she loves from marrying her son and repeating the misery of her own marriage with a weakling.

In Tradition and other One-Act Plays, Holt.

ON BAIL: A gambler's wife who has shared his illegal gains must help him pay his debt to the law; their son, too, is involved.

_Ibid._

THE TWO HOUSES: An old professor and his wife talk quietly together of the plans and the realities they have lived among.

In Masks, etc.

WAITING: False conventional ideas have long thwarted, and now threaten to wreck, the happiness of people who care greatly for each other.

In Tradition, etc.