By Claire Paterson
This year’s Fall Play, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, will open tonight at 7:30 p.m.an.d continue Friday and Saturday Dec. 5th, 6th, and 7th. The play is written by Bertolt Brecht and directed by Mrs. Maria Ogren and Mrs. Brooks.
Ogren has written a brief summary of the play for the viewers:
“The play is based on several sources: A Chinese drama from the late 13th Chalk Circle presented the story of a woman wrongly accused of the murder of her husband by the jealous first wife who covets the woman’s child. There is a trial at the end in which the baby is given back to its true mother.
It was later translated and adapted many times by other playwrights into French and Yiddish. An English version opened in London with Anna Mae Wong and Laurence Olivier. Then Brecht got hold of the story and wrote the play in German in 1944, hoping for a Broadway opening; we are presenting just one of the translations into English.
The play is actually two plays: the first concerns the argument between two collective farms in the Georgian area of the Caucasus Mountains – where the last winter Olympics was held. One group of farmers in the play raises goats and makes cheese; the other group plants fruit trees. After WW II, they return to the homes they had fled during the Nazi occupation, but the fruit growing cooperative wants to take over the land of the dairy farmers to expand their operation.
They claim that the dairy farmers can simply remain where they are – on land the dairymen and women claim is not right for their goats and where they feel like strangers in a land not traditionally their own.
In order to resolve the land problem, a group of professional storytellers are brought in to relate the story of “the chalk circle” in which a woman saves the abandoned baby son of the assassinated former governor and goes through many trials to keep the baby safe, utterly changing her own life and giving up her own happiness to do so.
Finally, the actual mother of the child returns and wants the child back so she can inherit her dead husband’s property. There is a trial, and the child is, in the end, given to the woman who had saved him.”
Tickets for the show are $5 for students and $8 for adults and can be purchased at the door.
“The play is based on several sources: A Chinese drama from the late 13th Chalk Circle presented the story of a woman wrongly accused of the murder of her husband by the jealous first wife who covets the woman’s child. There is a trial at the end in which the baby is given back to its true mother.
It was later translated and adapted many times by other playwrights into French and Yiddish. An English version opened in London with Anna Mae Wong and Laurence Olivier. Then Brecht got hold of the story and wrote the play in German in 1944, hoping for a Broadway opening; we are presenting just one of the translations into English.
The play is actually two plays: the first concerns the argument between two collective farms in the Georgian area of the Caucasus Mountains – where the last winter Olympics was held. One group of farmers in the play raises goats and makes cheese; the other group plants fruit trees. After WW II, they return to the homes they had fled during the Nazi occupation, but the fruit growing cooperative wants to take over the land of the dairy farmers to expand their operation.
They claim that the dairy farmers can simply remain where they are – on land the dairymen and women claim is not right for their goats and where they feel like strangers in a land not traditionally their own.
In order to resolve the land problem, a group of professional storytellers are brought in to relate the story of “the chalk circle” in which a woman saves the abandoned baby son of the assassinated former governor and goes through many trials to keep the baby safe, utterly changing her own life and giving up her own happiness to do so.
Finally, the actual mother of the child returns and wants the child back so she can inherit her dead husband’s property. There is a trial, and the child is, in the end, given to the woman who had saved him.”
Tickets for the show are $5 for students and $8 for adults and can be purchased at the door.