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George C. Wolfe 567 567 The Dramatic Tradition in Kentucky This is a short chapter because Kentucky has produced relatively few good dramatists. Playhouses in Kentucky, especially on college campuses, originally preferred to present plays written by Greek, English, or European playwrights (such as Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Ibsen) or American playwrights (such as Clyde Fitch and William Vaughn Moody). In Kentucky theaters, even well into the twentieth century, producers and managers were reluctant to provide a venue for homegrown talent. It was safer to go with Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, or even Tennessee Williams than to risk failure with an unknown local playwright . One of the earliest playwrights with a Kentucky pedigree was Charles T. Dazey, who was born in Illinois of Kentucky parents and who spent much of his boyhood with his grandparents in Bourbon County. Dazey wrote popular melodramas such as In Old Kentucky (1892), a play centered around a horse race and featuring such stereotypes as a mountain lass, an aristocrat from the Bluegrass region of the state, an unprincipled villain, a good-hearted moonshiner, and a colorful colonel; the plot line includes a mountain feud and a horse race won by the mountain lass masquerading as a jockey. The characters are painted in broad strokes appropriate for the acting style of heavy declamation and exaggerated gestures. Ann Crawford Flexner (1874–1955) was a step up in talent and achievement . Born in Georgetown, Kentucky, she graduated from Vassar in 1895, married Abraham Flexner, and lived in Louisville until 1905, when she moved to New York, where most of her plays were produced. Her greatest success was her dramatization of Alice Hegan Rice’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1904. One of her later plays was Aged 26 (1936), based on the love affair of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Another playwright was Thompson Buchanan (1877–1937), who grew up in Louisville and became a drama critic for the Louisville Herald. After 1903 he lived in New York, where he wrote his greatest success, A Woman’s Day (1909), in which a young woman fights successfully for her husband’s affections against a determined rival. After World War I he became head of the editorial staff of Goldwyn Pictures in New York. Cleves Kinkead (1882–1955) was a Louisville native who tried law, poli- 568 The Kentucky Anthology tics, and journalism before he turned his hand to writing plays, only one of which had much success. Common Clay is about Ellen Neal, a poor young girl who struggles for social respectability. It won a number of prizes and had successful runs in Boston, New York, and London, and was made into a movie two times. In 1930 Constance Bennett played the lead in a popular sound production. Other Kentucky authors who wrote dramas and who deserve a modest mention are Cale Young Rice and Olive Dargan. Both were more successful as poets. They wrote closet dramas, which were poetic plays designed mainly to be read and not performed. (Today they are neither read nor performed.) And there was D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), a native of Oldham County, who should be acknowledged not only as the “inventor” of Hollywood, as some theater historians label him, for his pioneering techniques in producing, directing, and editing films, but also as an actor and playwright for some ten years before he turned to film. Until he began making his own films, he sold “scenarios”—crude story outlines or treatments— to Biograph in New York. For his own films he wrote much of what we would call a book or script today. In recent years Kentucky’s resident theaters have sporadically encouraged playwrights in the state to submit plays for possible production. Actors Theatre of Louisville, founded in 1963, has from time to time produced plays by Kentuckians, particularly since the start of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Eben Henson’s Pioneer Playhouse in Danville and the Horse CaveTheatre in Hart County have also supported regional playwrights. In June 1994, for example, Piggyback, Sallie Bingham’s play about the Kentucky poet and balladeer John Jacob Niles and his relationship with the photographer Doris Ulmann, premiered at the Horse Cave Theatre under the direction of Pamela White. The Louisville-born playwright Naomi Wallace has had several of her plays performed at Actors Theatre, including One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, and Slaughter City U.S.A., which is based on...

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