t and least pretentious
settings are generally most effective. The Irish players, as Mr.
Yeats tells us, "have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is
little more than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and
leaves of gold for a wood, a great green curtain, with a red
stencil upon it to carry the eye upward, for a palace." Mr. John
Merrill of the Francis Parker School describes the quite excellent
results secured with a dark curtain in a semicircle--a
cyclorama--for background, and with colored lights.[1] Such a
staging leaves the attention free to follow the lines, and the
imagination to picture whatever the play suggests as the place of
the action.

[Footnote 1: John Merrill: "Drama and the School," in _Drama_,
November, 1919.]

THE PHILOSOPHER OF BUTTERBIGGENS[1]

Harold Chapin

[Footnote 1: Included by special permission of Mrs. Alice Chapin.
Permission to present this play must be secured from Samuel
French, 28 West 38th Street, New York City, who controls all
acting rights, etc., in this country.]

CHARACTERS

DAVID PIRNIE LIZZIE, his daughter
JOHN BELL, his son-in-law
ALEXANDER, John's little son

SCENE: JOHN BELL'S _tenement at Butterbiggens. It consists of the
very usual "two rooms, kitchen, and bath," a concealed bed in the
parlor and another in the kitchen enabling him to house his
family--consisting of himself, his wife, his little son, and his
aged father-in-law--therein. The kitchen-and-living-room is a
good-sized square room. The right wall (our right as we look at
it) is occupied by a huge built-in dresser, sink, and coal bunker,
the left wall by a high-manteled, ovened, and boilered fireplace,
the recess on either side of which contains a low painted
cupboard. Over the far cupboard hangs a picture of a ship, but
over the near one is a small square window. The far wall has two
large doors in it, that on the right leading to the lobby, and
that on the left appertaining to the old father-in-law's concealed
bed. The walls are distempered a brickish red. The ceiling once
was white. The floor is covered with bright linoleum and a couple
of rag rugs--one before the fire--a large one--and a smaller one
before the door of the concealed bed._

_A deal table is just to right of centre. A long flexible
gas-bracket depends from the ceiling above it. Another
many-jointed gas-bracket projects from the middle of the high
mantelpiece, its flame turned down towards the stove. There are
w