Theatre
The Great Divide
William Vaughn Moody · 1906
Opening lines
Winthrop
What on earth possessed you to bring such a load of duds to Arizona?
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
In a cabin in southern Arizona, on a spring evening, Ruth Jordan, nineteen, who has come from the East to stay with her brother, is left alone. Three drunken men come in. To escape the other two, she promises Stephen Ghent that she will belong to him if he saves her; he gives the Mexican a chain of gold nuggets and wounds the third man in a duel. He marries her in haste before a justice of the peace and takes her up into the mountains, where he makes his fortune in a mine. In secret she weaves baskets and rugs to buy back the chain that paid her price.
Context
The play was first staged in Chicago in 1906 under a title that evokes the rape of the Sabine women, with Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller, to whom the volume would be dedicated. Revised and renamed, it opened on 3 October 1906 at the Princess Theatre in New York and ran there until March 1907, then returned the following season. It was seen as a conflict between the puritanism of the East and the individualism of the West, and it made its author one of the most promising writers of his time. His two earlier verse plays belonged to a trilogy that his death left unfinished.
Who it is for
Three acts in prose, with no French translation on record, in which two American moralities of the beginning of the century clash.
Prizes and reception
Two hundred and thirty-eight performances in New York in 1906 and 1907, then a second season; three film adaptations, in 1915, 1925 and 1929.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.