Word: cootch
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Creaking and groaning, the play tells the barely credible story of Lilly Turner (Dorothy Hall), a cootch dancer who is married to a weakling carnival porter (James Bell, who made the horrifying death walk in The Last Mile). Miss Turner, although possessing a heart of gold, continues a lurid past by surrendering consistently to the medicine show's strong men. One of these, an idiot, throws her husband down some stairs just as she is about to run away to Atlantic City with another...
...stool pigeon for a rival circus. The rascally son of the privilege car's rascally proprietor unexpectedly returns from jail to take up counterfeiting. There are also various subplots which flow back and forth across a stage crowded with amusing, if too finely drawn, circus types-"razorbacks" (laborers), cootch dancers, a harmless dope fiend, a harmless kleptomaniac (funny William Foran, brother of the playwright and the man who telephoned "Mrs. Margolies" in The Front Page). High point of the drama comes with the second act curtain, when the circus rallying cry of "Hey, rube!" goes up as the train...