Red Harvest; a comedy of waste in three acts

[light external wear, minor bump and slight dog-ear at upper right corner of front cover, some age-toning to edges of text block]. (B&W photographs, stage diagrams) An anti-war play set in France during the waning days of World War I (August 1918), centered around a group of Red Cross nurses who heroically defy the military authorities in order to relocate their field hospital to a partially wrecked convent in Chteau-Thierry, very close to the front lines. The play is dedicated to "Linda K. Meirs, Chief Nurse, and Her Nurses, Aides, and Corpsmen," and Ms. Meirs's WWI experience corresponds very well to the play's protagonist, "Zinna Meek, Chief Nurse." Ms. Meirs (1884-1972), per Wikipedia, "was one of the first six American nurses to receive the Florence Nightingale Medal from the International Committee of the Red Cross [in 1920, and] also received honors from the French (the Croix de Guerre), Romania (the Queen Marie Cross), Germany (the German Red Cross Medal), and Victory Medals from the United States and New Jersey." The drama was first staged in Ithaca, New York, in 1934, but didn't make it to the New York stage until three years later, when it had a short (15 performances) run at the National Theatre, under the direction of Antoinette Perry, in March-April 1937. Burns Mantle, reviewing it in the N.Y. Daily News, acknowledged its "glorification of the bravery, the tenacity, the good common sense of the American nurse units -- carrying on under all sorts of pressure, invading the danger spots even against orders and doing their jobs with miraculous efficiency." As drama, however, he found it lacking, scoring it as "a series of little dramas rattling around like peas in the center of a world drama outside. Little dramas that give off a faint tapping sound that can barely be heard in the general roar." About that "general roar": judging from the extensive list of properties, furniture and effects included as part of the end matter in this book (not to mention that there were 23 speaking parts and over a dozen supernumeraries), it must have been quite challenging to mount a production. (NOTE that this play is completely unrelated to Dashiell Hammett's famous novel of the same name.)

Product Info

Publisher: Samuel French

Year: (c.1937, 1933)

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

Seller Info

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