Word: scarecrow
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Unusual interest attaches to the fall production of the Dramatic Club. To some extent this is due to the success of the performances last year, but to a far greater extent to the wise selection of the play to be produced. "The Scarecrow," by Percy MacKaye '97, whose "Jeanne d'Arc," "Sappho and Phaon," and "Mater," have been seen in New York and elsewhere, is undoubtedly Mr. MacKaye's most distinguished work. Though published in 1908, it has never been performed, and the Dramatic Club, therefore, has the distinction of presenting for the first time a play which is considered...
...Scarecrow" is based on Hawthorne's tale of "Feathertop," but is in no way a dramatization of it. "Starting with the same basic theme," Mr. MacKaye writes in his introduction to the published play, "I have sought to elaborate it, by my own treatment, to a different and more inclusive issue." He builds from Hawthorne's satire of coxcombry and charlatanism, "a tragedy of the ludicrous." In Hawthorne, "the scarecrow Feathertop is ridiculous, as the emblem of a superficial fop;" in Mr. MacKaye's play, "the scarecrow Ravensbane is pitiful, as the emblem of human bathos." The play...
...theme comes to the surface only at intervals. The prevailing note is comedy, and there is much rich humor of character and situation. The first act, in the blacksmith shop of Goody Rickby, the witch, in a seventeenth century Massachusetts village, shows the creation and early training of the scarecrow, who, under the title of Lord Ravensbane, is sent into the world to avenge on Rachel, the daughter of Justice Merton, the wrong that the latter in his youth has inflicted on the witch. Attended by Dickon, "a Yankee impersonation of the Prince of Darkness," Ravensbane, a perfect straw...
...Graduate Committee of the Harvard Dramatic Club has chosen "The Scarecrow" by Percy MacKaye '97, as the play to be produced by the club the first week in December...
...unlike anything that has been seen in the theatre these many years that parallels of any kind are hard to draw; and yet it has so much that is striking, even startling, in it that a theatrical sensation is by no means out of the question. "The Scarecrow" is a prose "tragedy of the indicrous," based upon a suggestion derived from Hawthorne's "Feathertop"; but the purely satirical purpose of the original story is replaced by an ethical significance vastly more profound; and an action that begins in grotesque comedy closes in genuine tragedy. The seen is laid...