Paul Green's The House of Connelly: A Critical Edition

Paul Green

Sep 2014 · McFarland

About this ebook

One of Paul Green's best plays, The House of Connelly, was the first play performed (on Broadway in 1931) by the renowned Group Theatre of New York. This book reintroduces the play, and the playwright--famous in his day, but largely forgotten now, although his outdoor symphonic drama The Lost Colony continues to be performed every summer in Manteo, North Carolina.

The House of Connelly, is a more traditional drama, comparable to the writing of Tennessee Williams, and the editor asserts that the play deals more directly and fully with racial issues of the early 20th-century South than Williams did in his work. A new edition of the play includes both the original tragic ending and the revised ending Green wrote upon the Group Theatre directors' request. The writing, production and publication history of the play is provided, as well as a scene-by-scene critical analysis and a discussion of the 1934 film adaptation, Carolina. The play's theme is change and Green shows with both endings that the South had to change to survive.

About the author

Margaret D. Bauer is the Ralph Hardee Rives Chair of Southern Literature and a Harriot College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and editor of the North Carolina Literary Review.