ROAM THOUGH I MAY

A Comedy in Three Acts. By John William Rogers '16. Walter H. Baker Co., Boston. Presented by The Little Theatre of Dallas, Dec. 12, 1932.

This is a photographic play from exposures made in a Texan small town sitting room, furnished with melodeon and peopled with members of a widely scattered family returning to celebrate the mother's birthday. Instead of the hoped-for happiness of the occasion, old antipathies begin to work, strengthened by the shades of sophistication brought back to the fundamentalist home. Two lines of action, neither of which promises or achieves broad dramatic or comic effect, give direction to the quarrels and yield some amusing scenes. The mother must be dissuaded from giving a farm to Calvin College to memorialize her husband; and the cub-professor son, somewhat frosted by his study of philosophy, must be saved from the blandishments of the mother's young "helper." Mother is strong willed and resists all frontal attacks on her pet plan, but she is finally brought to reason by one of her more artful daughters, who, seeming to befriend her, inoculates her with the suggestion that the long dead father would never have consented to be memorialized in a college whose president could speak slightingly of Noah and the Whale. The professor comes off rather better. In spite of the protests of disagreeable sister Clara, and the less high-minded rivalry of brother Bob from Chicago, he pursues his faltering love, is caught in a compromising scene, that gives the play its one sensation, and is clearly on the way to a delayed matrimony when the curtain falls.

The characters are clearly drawn and would come to life on the stage with amusing effect. So many with so little to do, however, create problems in dialogue that are not always met with complete success.