"THE PRODUCT OF THE MILL"

Below, the CRIMSON prints a review of the four-act play "The Product of the Mill," by Miss E. A. McFadden, of Radcliffe, which was announced on Saturday as the winner of the Craig Prize for 1911. The play which won the prize last year was the well-known "The End of the Bridge," by Miss Florence L. Lincoln, also of Radcliffe, which went through over 100 performances at the Castle Square Theatre last winter. "The Product of the Mill" will be produced at the same place immediately after the Christmas holidays.

There is considerable difference between the two plays that have taken the Craig Prize. The new play is a little melodramatic. Where the first dealt with a doctor's family and his friends, Miss McFadden's play leaves polite society after the first act for the cotton mills of South Carolina. Though its theme is not primarily the abuses of child labor, they have a considerable importance in the drama. Last year the four acts of the prize play passed in only two rooms. This year the play will call for four settings, including the interior of a spinning room in a cotton mill and the exterior of the factory. There will be four changes of scenery and the play will run in six scenes. The first scene of the first act passes in a library in New York; the second, in the same library nine years later. The second act also has two scenes, the first in the cotton mill, the second in a one-room cabin of typical "poor-whites." Act three shows the exterior of the mill; act four, the cabin again. Sixteen characters, not to mention ten women's voices speaking out of a mob, mark another difference. Finally the structure of the play is in quite another vein from that of Miss Lincoln's. Where "The End of the Bridge" gradually evolved the story of Peter and at the same time showed the recovery of a woman's mental balance and her growing love-for the doctor that saved her, "The Product of the Mill" is a simple narrative of a mother's search for a child, a narrative that might end at any moment if the necessary words were spoken, but that keeps on for the regulation two hours and three-quarters. It may be a little early to speak of the superiority of Miss Lincoln's dialogue as well as construction and characterization; perhaps that should wait for the test of actual production.

If there are differences in the two prize plays, there are also surface resemblances. The character of greatest interest is once more a child; indeed, the salvation of the play will probably rest upon what Miss McDannell (Mr. Craig's actress of children's parts) can get from the boy's speeches. They are the only element of sure distinction in the play. Curiously enough there is a trained nurse in the new play as well as in the old, and there is also a woman wavering on the verge of insanity.

The principal interest in "The Product in the Mill" lies in a mother's search for a child abducted nine years before. Driven to desperation, she leaves her home to try to do what the detectives have failed in, and, of course, she succeeds. A subsidiary interest in the typewritten manuscript, though production on the stage may reverse the values, is the question of child labor. The lost child is found working in a Southern cotton mill under the usual unhealthful conditions; indeed in danger of life and limb from a broken machine. In this purely incidental manner Miss McFadden shows much more vividly the problem and the horrors of child slavery than many another playwright who has avowedly written of it alone.

On Christmas eve nine years ago the Carmans, Martha and Henry, had put their five-year-old boy to bed and turned to their dinner, when Simon Lirty--half-brother to Henry and one of those monsters of moral weakness and depravity that make such useful levers in starting melodramas--climbed in through a window and stole the child away. He had begged and borrowed until Henry had at last turned him off, and this was to be his revenge for the "desertion." Nine years later, again on Christmas eve, that other useful dramatic slow-match, the new trained nurse, tells Martha of a man she tended at a hospital in Georgia who confessed a similar abduction, and identifies Lirty by a photograph. The man had died and the nurse had never found the child. The prospect seems as hopeless as any that had baffled Henry's detectives, but Martha, her mind tottering dangerously from the strain of waiting and longing, sets off to the South to hunt for the child through all the mills in the land. Henry, who owns one of these same mills, sends orders to push the profits as hard as possible to supply money for further search.

To Henry's own mill Martha finally goes. There in the spinning-room, with its racing machinery and tired children tending the bobbins, she finds two little ones who attract her. Brother and sister they appear to the world, though they have already explained to us that "Skinny" Hinks, the boy, is really the child that Lirty had left when he died in the hospital. The remainder of the act tells of Martha's attempts to secure work in the mill in order to see the children, how the foreman and a director think her an investigator and refuse, and how "Skinny" tries to run away from his "father" and live with the "niggers who don't have to work." He has been put at a warping machine which is working very badly and has killed two men the week before, and fear of it spurs him on.

Old Hinks captures him, brings him back to work. With a mob of crazed mothers who gather outside the mill when piercing screams come from within, we learn that "Skinny" has been injured in the machinery. Martha takes him to his cabin and nurses him. From the lips of old Hinks she hears the story of how he took him from a dying man in a hospital who owed him money; and she knows that "Skinny" is her own child.

The success of "The Product of the Mill" will depend on the effect of the children and their speeches. They are much better written than anyof the other dialogues in the piece. There is a pathetic humor running through them that may prove deeply touching. Even in the manuscript, the picture of suffering childhood in the mill is vivid. On these elements of humanness the popular appeal of the play must rest, much more than upon the somewhat commonplace story that it tells.--Boston Transcript