The Lost Colony: A Symphonic Drama of American History
160
The Lost Colony: A Symphonic Drama of American History
160Paperback(Edited, with an introduction and a note on the text, by Laurence G. Avery)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807849705 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2001 |
| Series: | Chapel Hill Books |
| Edition description: | Edited, with an introduction and a note on the text, by Laurence G. Avery |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction: At The Lost Colony
At The Lost Colony, performed outdoors during the summer on coastal Roanoke Island, weather matters. The weather does not always cooperate. Occasionally it rains. Sometimes it is hot and sticky. Every few years a hurricane blows through. But usually by 8:30, when performances start, the weather is tolerable. Once in a while it is perfect.
July 20, 2000, was one of those happy evenings. The morning had been overcast, but a breeze in the afternoon cleared the sky and the temperature rose to 77 degrees. Around 8:00, when people began finding their seats in the Waterside Theatre, the temperature was 75 degrees (and would drop to 70 degrees before the show ended at 10:50). Many people came in from the beaches in shorts but with pullover sweaters or windbreakers tied around their waists. The man next to me, from Long Island, was at Nags Head for the week with his wife, seated on the other side of him. She was the member of the family who wanted to see The Lost Colony. He declared himself more at home in Broadway theaters. I watched the first stars appear while dusk still held enough light to outline the stage against Roanoke Sound. In the row behind me a little girl, maybe four and wearing a yellow dress, climbed into her mother's lap and wondered when the play would begin.
The Lost Colony began in 1937. That was the 350th anniversary of the earliest attempted English settlement in North America, on Roanoke Island in 1587, and people in eastern North Carolina had long been frustrated by what seemed to them the neglect of that important event by historians and in the popular mind. Knowing the religious pageant at Oberammergau, Germany, they thought of staging a pageant themselves to raise awareness of the colony (the anniversary would provide a needed rallying point) and turned to Paul Green to write it. Green, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for the first of his several Broadway plays, was a natural for the job. Steeped in North Carolina history and lore, he had in fact dreamed of writing a play about the Roanoke colonists since his college days in the early 1920s.
Everyone associated with the project knew it was a long shot. (The sponsoring organization, the Roanoke Island Historical Association, led by W. O. Saunders, editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, and D. B. Fearing, wholesale grocer in Manteo and a state senator from Dare County, was hesitant at first about assuming financial responsibility for the production.) The question was, would people come to see the show? That is a worry anytime you put on a play, but it had real urgency when the play was on Roanoke Island. It wasn't because the area was densely populated that the Wright brothers had gone to nearby Kitty Hawk some years earlier to test their flying machines. Towns in the region were scarce (the makeup of Dare County suggests why: 300 square miles of land, 1,200 square miles of water). None of the towns at the time had a population of more than 10,000. Manteo, on Roanoke Island, its streets paved with shells, was closest to the site of the colony and the play, and home to 547 people. About twice that many lived in Wanchese, a fishing village and the other town on the island.
So, for the play to prosper, people would have to come from far away (relatively speaking). The trouble was, there was no good way to get there. A contemporary document, North Carolina: A Guide to the Old North State, complied by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and published in 1939, gives details of life at the time. The route onto Roanoke Island from the north involved a ferry ride (seventy-five cents for car and driver, ten cents for each additional passenger), a stretch on something called "the floating road" (at the time — it had taken several forms over the years — a sixteen-foot-wide strip of asphalt suspended on steel cables hitched to pilings over several miles of swamp that would swallow up anything falling into it), the rest of the way on roads that were little more than packed sand. The other and easier approach to the island, from the west, consisted of miles of sandy dirt roads and two toll ferries, one across the Alligator River (so named because alligators frequented the water there), the other from Manns Harbor, jumping-off place on the mainland, a crossing of Croatan Sound that took thirty minutes. (The ferry made a round-trip every hour and a half between 7:30 A.M. and 6:30 P.M., so you might wait a while at Manns Harbor before departing for the island.)
Despite all of which, Fearing, Saunders, Green, and the rest went merrily on. A large contingent of so-called CCC boys was already encamped on Roanoke Island (men in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a forerunner of the WPA, who were building up sand dunes on the outer banks in one of the early futile efforts to stabilize those barrier islands), and Fearing got a crew of them, with mules and scoops, to work on the theater, grading the seating area and building up a stage at water's edge. Theater equipment came from the Rockefeller Foundation (an organ for musical accompaniment) and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (lights and related gear). The university also supplied the director (Samuel Selden) and several actors (numerous local residents also acted in the play, as did men from the CCC camp). Actors for the leading parts were professionals provided by the Federal Theatre Project. The U.S. Postal Department issued a Virginia Dare stamp to publicize the event, and the Treasury minted a Dare/Raleigh half-dollar, allowing the Roanoke Island Historical Association to sell the coins for $1.50 apiece to raise money.
The Lost Colony was a child of its era. At no other time could it have been gotten together in just the way it was in 1937. With its grassroots origin, community spirit, and celebratory aim, the production was precisely the sort of effort to attract national attention during the New Deal phase of the Great Depression. Paul Green recalls those early days in two essays included at the end of the present edition. The play opened on July 4 (a Sunday) with about 2,500 people in attendance, then played Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights through Labor Day. A leading drama critic, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, gave the play an enthusiastic review during the season. President Roosevelt attended a performance on August 18, birthday of Virginia Dare, first child of English parents born in America, and the play became a cause for Eleanor Roosevelt in her efforts to enrich the lives of depression era Americans through the arts. Exact attendance figures do not exist, since record keeping was not a strong point that first season, but people managed to get there. The best estimates are that the play had an audience of about 50,000 during the summer of 1937.
Table of Contents
Introduction: At The Lost ColonyA Note on the Text
The Lost Colony
List of ScenesMembers of the Lost Colony
List of Characters
Act 1
Act 2
From the 1946 Edition: Introduction (Dialogue at Evening)
From the 1954 Edition: The Beginning of The Lost Colony
What People are Saying About This
Americans take great pride in The Lost Colony because it so brilliantly dramatizes the extraordinary courage, the depth of integrity, and the devotion to freedom that are the hallmarks of the American character. It is the taproot of our moral fiber. As Paul Green would have wanted, the play brings out the best in Americans. You cannot fail to be inspired and uplifted when you read this new edition of such a remarkable dramatization of our heritage.—Scott J. Parker, Director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
I first read Paul Green's The Lost Colony 55 years ago when I was 20. I was moved by it then, and I was moved by it again as I read this printing of the text. I was a member of The Lost Colony cast when I was 21. I played the first soldier in the scene with Old Tom and a colonist. Beginning when I was 23, I played Sir Walter Raleigh for 5 seasons. I had a great time and learned a lot. Thanks to The Lost Colony.—Andy Griffith