CHILDREN OF EARTH. In 1913 Mr. Winthrop Ames, of the Little Theatre, New York, offered a prize of $10,000 for the best play by an American author. The manuscripts were to be submitted anonymously. In June 1914 the judges, after having gone through 17 manuscripts, awarded the prize to Miss Alice Brown, of Boston, for her play of New England life, 'Children of Earth.> This piece was given its first production at the Booth Theatre, New York, on 12 Jan. 1915. It was hailed in the press as an effort showing high literary and poetic quality, but it failed of popu lar appeal because it was a middle-age romance and lacked true, red-blooded passion.
The heroine, worn out with self-sacrifice, and grown old in the service of her conscience, experiences a last mad flame of youth in a wild, unexplainable adventure with one Peter Hale. This flame finally dies down in the last act, and our New England heroine is finally crushed by circumstance.
Though the play has literary quality, it is defective dramatically. It is too intent on ex ternalizing New England types. But none of
the New England characteristics are deeply in grained in the characters; they are super imposed upon them in order to furnish a genre picture.
There is the passion of great souls in Mary Ellen and Peter Hale; they are too detached in their poetic love, too lukewarm in their deter mination to take from life what it has to give them. The consequence is that when the New England conscience drives them back into con ventionality, both the theatre audience and the reader are unconvinced of the logical reasons for their mad adventure. The other characters in 'Children of Earth> are types, not human beings definitely interwoven into the plot. That is the play failed on the stage. In its printed form, while it leaves one unsatisfied, it at least convinces one that here is an Ameri can drama with literary quality which dominates over its dramatic effectiveness. The play was reviewed by Clayton Hamilton in The Book man (41 :62).