User:Playdramabuff/Cocaine (play)

Cocaine
Written by	Pendleton King, 1921
Characters	Joe Nora

Cocaine is a play by Pendleton King. The following one-act play is reprinted from The Provincetown Plays. Ed. George Cram Cook & Frank Shay. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1921. It is believed to be in the public domain and may therefore be performed without royalties. But it's Pendleton King's Cocaine that's the intriguing dark horse, the kind of lesser-known, infrequently-staged classic that Savage Rose is known for producing. King was a playwright of great promise whose career was interrupted by the first World War. Savage Rose producing artistic director J. Barrett Cooper first discovered Cocaine in a used book store anthology. The dialogue is so alive and sounds like anything that would be written today, says Cooper. But what we've been able to find in it is a real grittiness. It's not a romantic take on cocaine addicts. King's own story is an American tragedy just begging to be produced. He was a totally secret rich guy slumming it down in the Village, says Cooper. He was very unassuming, very nice, well educated, and he wrote this incredible play. A young gambler and the jail's cook fall in love at first sight and make plans to run away together, but fate intervenes. One-act plays were frequently the warm-up for the main show, Cooper says. That was when you'd go to the theater and expect to spend three or four hours at a theater. They're an hour and twenty, an hour and a half. The new idea is get 'em in and get 'em out because that's all the audience can take. Jake, a Mississippi cotton gin owner, burns down his rival's mill, who retaliates by seducing Jake's emotionally fragile young wife. Addiction, obsession, revenge - it's a bit of a bleak bill, Cooper admits. But, he says, each play contains a certain amount of hope.

Characters

The play has mainly two characters:

• Joe
• Nora

Synopsis

Here is a small summary of the play from the cited sources:

After roles in The People, both in the Eighth and Ninth Bills that season (and at least one appearance with The Morningside Players, a group connected with Columbia University), King disappears from the Players' history, other than a mention that he was drafted immediately once the U.S. entered the war.

King's upper class upbringing combined with his brief residence in the Village makes his authorship of Cocaine a rather surprising feat. Both are addicted to cocaine and are living together in an attic flat on their last dime in the Village. They haven't had any stuff for four days. To that end, Joe brings up that he's willing to turn tricks himself and wants to be able to contribute. The landlady, who's made it clear she wants Joe, has told him they're going to be evicted, but that he can make it all right if he'll sleep with her. In an ironic twist, the gas meter has run out and they don't have even a quarter to turn it on.

Critic Heywood Broun wrote that the the form of this one-act tragedy is good, and that it is in the main well written, and much of it sounds like true talk. Since he doesn't qualify his statement, one ventures it to mean that the dialogue is not in any way poetic but realistic to a fault. Less concerned with reaction to the play's morality, he instead states that the play distorts emphasis and produced nervous laughter, even from an audience used to less mainstream work. The set for Cocaine, an attic bedroom in the Village, was created by Ira Remsen and Carroll Berry. Remsen was a painter who trained in Paris and migrated to the Village on his return.

An interesting King family legend concerned a huge white camellia that reached to the second floor of the house that bloomed beautifully each year, but was said to blossom profusely when any family tragedy was imminent. The camellia was apparently destroyed in a fire that gutted the family mansion while King was in Europe during the war, but reappeared after the fire, in the place it had always been, and blossomed profusely in the Spring just before Young Pendleton's death. King's parents abandoned plans to rebuild their mansion on Sand Hill after Pendleton's death, living as recluses in a refurbished caretaker's cottage on the grounds. Instead they had several houses built for veterans of Pendleton's Army Division and/or their families who were in need. The area was called Pendleton Camp and next to it is now Pendleton King Cerebral Palsy Park, with a pool and playground equipment for the use of those stricken with the disease. The beautiful site has now been restored and is maintained by the city, known by all in Augusta as Pendleton King Park.

Erick Berry had studied at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, potentially knowing Charles Demuth and/or Rita Wellman and this could have been his connection to the Players.

Scholarly Articles

Some notable references on the play from scholarly articles are as follows:

"Last year they put on 'Cocaine' by Pendleton King—Pendleton King, by the way, is another playwright of promise whose playwrighting has been interrupted by the war." -- Quarterly Bulletin of the Providence Public Library - Volumes 16-17 - Page 154:Providence Public Library (R.I.) - 1918

"The Provincetown Players produced at their laboratory theatre in New York in March The Prodigal Son by Harry Kemp, Cocaine by Pendleton King, and The People by Susan Glaspell." -- Theatre Arts Magazine - Volumes 1-2 - Page 144:1917

"The Provincetown Pla ers prodhced at their laboratory theatre in New York in March The Pro {gal Son by Harry Kemp, Cocaine by Pendleton King, and The People by Susan Glaspell." -- Theatre Arts - Volume 2 - Page 144:1917

"Cocaine, by Pendleton King, contains a good plot—a plot that O. Henry could have made into a fine story." -- The Pacific Review - Volume 2 - Page 175:Joseph Barlow Harrison, ‎Richard Frederick Scholz, ‎Harvey B. Densmore - 1921

External links

Performances and Videos

1. ▶ Cocaine part 1.avi - YouTube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAGBBnrL-o
2. ▶ American One Acts trailer - YouTube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8flCFf_CI
3. ▶ Cocaine part 2.avi - YouTube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s4H2TELuKI
4. ▶ Cocaine - YouTube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi37kAd3Ag4

Online script links

1. http://www.one-act-plays.com/dramas/cocaine.html
2. http://www.one-act-plays.com/royalty_free_plays.html
3. http://www.one-act-plays.com/castsize/plays_2_actors.html

Category:Plays