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

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Margaret D. Bauer reintroduces one of Paul Green’s best plays, The House of Connelly, the first play performed (on Broadway, in 1931) by the renowned Group Theatre of New York. In so doing, Bauer also perhaps reintroduces the playwright himself, famous and well respected in his day, but largely forgotten today, except for his outdoor symphonic drama The Lost Colony, which continues to be performed every summer in Manteo, North Carolina. Green’s The House of Connelly is a more traditional drama, comparable to the writing of Tennessee Williams, and Bauer asserts that this play is as good as Williams’s plays and deals more directly and fully with racial issues of the early twentieth-century South than Williams did in his drama. Bauer’s new edition includes both endings to the play: the tragic ending that Green wrote originally and the revised ending he wrote upon the Group Theatre directors’ request. Bauer provides the writing, production, and publication history of the play; a scene-by-scene critical analysis, including an analysis of both endings; and a discussion of the 1934 film adaptation, Carolina. The play’s theme is change, Bauer concludes: with both endings, Green shows that the South had to change if the people were going to survive.