Four Plays

And some themes

Peter Rabbit Helps the Children by Eva Williams, Crooks by Nathan Kussy, A Friendly Tip by Katharine Kavanaugh and His Sisters by Beulah King

Some children are walking home from school. It ought to be spring. Winter has gone on so long, too long. The children want the temperature to rise; they would like to see some flowers. But the spring is just not coming. They have an idea. What brings the spring? It is the rain — in fair gentle showers — and then the spring is brought by the daffodils, the crocuses, the lilies. They go out into the field. Surely the flowers must be around here somewhere?

The children investigate.

They find the flowers hiding under the soil, as is their wont. They can’t come out until it is no longer cold. The children start to ask around. Will the shrubs help the spring approach? No, they cannot. Will the trees help the spring arrive? They would love to, but they can’t move. The oak tree, king of the forest, has to preserve his acorns so that the birds may eat them. The other trees cannot move lest they lose their leaves.

But the trees have one suggestion. Peter Rabbit lives deep in the forest. He has his own little house. And as all know, you cannot have spring and Easter without rabbits. The children are sent off to rouse the rabbit, and although he is yawning when they knock, Peter Rabbit answers the door and listens to what the children want. They want the spring to arrive.

I can’t promise anything, Peter Rabbit says, without the good sun, the gentle showers; they are the things that make the plants and flowers grow. But I will do as I can, Peter Rabbit says, and the children leave him contented.

Days later — days of decent sun and gentle showers — the crocuses and the lilies and the daffodils are appearing. The trees are getting ready to do as the season commands. The children walk around the newly living landscape. They have been saved from the suffering of the early spring.

How did this happen, one of them asks.

It was Peter Rabbit, chorus the flowers. He went around asking the weather and the world to bring on spring. The children are delighted. And in response, they make a solemn promise that they will always, in every case, be nice to rabbits.

Across the ocean in New York, a boy John is besieged by his designing sisters in a farce. A spring dance, a charity dance, is coming up, and each of John’s sisters has in mind a different girl for him to ask to dance. They all have favoured candidates, and they all have their methods, their intrigues, to get him to promise that he’ll ask the girl they want. One makes John promise he will call her candidate on the phone. The other invites her friend over, without obvious motive, only so she may contrive to spring the invitation on the two of them. All the while, John has noticed that the new maid — whom all his sisters despise — has rather beautiful eyes.

What do we imagine happens?

In another part of New York, at quite another time, a man and a woman who were once close are meeting in the evening. The man, Jim, is a lawyer. His life is dull. His wife is a decent enough woman but she has none of the glamour of his old paramour, Jean (the woman he is meeting), who is now a famous actress, internationally known. But single in spite of that. Work does so badly get in the way, does it not?

Jim wants, well, he does not know what he wants. But somehow, he wants to turn the clock back a little. He and Jean are past thirty; he’s married; they can’t be together any more. But perhaps if they were to go out to the opera as they used to, they might have an enjoyable time.

Jim goes out to get some tickets. And who arrives at the door but Jim’s poor wife, Alice. Alice is, at least for a moment, full of bitterness and rage. She assumes Jean is stealing her husband, when really, that is not her intention.

What Jean instead offers is a friendly, somewhat sickening, advice. Alice’s husband, Jean’s old friend, is, it turns out, the kind of person whose head is turned easily by appearances. Make yourself more glam, Jean in effect says to Alice, and he’ll want you again. Rest assured. Alice disappears offstage to have herself made up and generally primped by Jean’s maid. And when Jim arrives with the tickets, Jean tells him that a friend of hers has dropped in, and that this friend really loves Jim deeply, and that he ought to go to the opera with her instead. At which moment, Alice is reintroduced, dolled up; the two (Jim and Alice) reconcile; and Jean blesses the two of them, seeing them head off together.

And as for Jean, she is left as she was before — absent the man who once loved her. Completely alone, save the maid.

With all her free and loveless time, she might read the short play Crooks by Nathan Kussy. It’s funny.