I’ve previously written about seeing a senior class play in Richland in March 1958, where three one act plays were performed, although I only recall the first one entitled How the Story Grew. Briefly it involved a series of women spreading a simple story about a new neighbor moving into town, with the story becoming more elaborate and unrecognizable with each telling. The first woman saw that a long abandoned house was now occupied but when she went to greet the new arrivals, there was no answer at the door. By the time the story had been related to the eighth gossiper, all sorts of mayhem had been wreaked on the first woman who had been killed by the bandits who had moved into the house. Finally the first woman reappears, good as new, to tell all the other women that the new neighbor is the new town minister and he hadn’t heard her knocking on the door. Or something like that.

In any case the play made a great impression on me and I’ve been trying to locate a copy of it for the past few years. Or rather I’ve been trying to locate a reasonably priced copy of it. All the ones I found were in the hundreds of dollar range, a bit beyond what I was willing to pay.

But perseverance paid off, and I finally found a twenty dollar copy.

As the play has long since entered the public domain, having been published in 1908, I’ve uploaded a copy to this web site [see below], so anyone can now freely obtain a copy of it.

If they wish.

Though I have to say, I believe the play is pretty much a relic of its time and pretty much unperformable these days. Well, unperformable in most places that are apt to be performing plays.

You see, the play is unabashedly racist, with the N-word being freely used all over the place.

Now I’m quite certain that in the performance that I saw, that was changed. To what, I’m not sure. In the copy that I have, the N-word is crossed out in pencil and various spellings of something like “furriner” are written in. Perhaps that’s what they used back in Richland in 1958, I don’t know.

But that reminds me that there’s one other thing that I recall from that 1958 high school performance. The student actors used very pronounced Pennsylvania Dutch accents. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, surrounded as I was by Pennsylvania Dutch everything, but I now assume that it was a choice that the director made to emphasize that accent.

In any case my long quest to find that play is over, and I’m relieved to find out that the play does conform to the broad outline of my memory but disappointed to find that it’s yet one more example of the racism that has infected this country ever since its founding and sadly continues until the present day.