THE MAKER OF DREAMS[28] A FANTASY IN ONE ACT By OLIPHANT DOWN

THE MAKER OF DREAMS[28] A FANTASY IN ONE ACT By OLIPHANT DOWN

The Maker of Dreams by the late Oliphant Down was first given at the Royalty Theatre in Glasgow, November 20, 1911. The design for the setting here reproduced was used when the play was acted in March, 1915, at The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. The picture does not show how touches of red here and there in the scene, and the brilliant blue sky, visible through the quaint windows, enhanced the character of the black and white of the walls and of the flower pots. The back wall of the set was mounted on casters and, while Pierrette slept, moved silently off stage, to disclose to the audience a formal garden at the back, where a miniature Pierrot and a tiny Pierrette did a joyous little dance, thus suggesting to the spectators Pierrette's happy dream.

Pierrot, the hero of this and of the preceding play, has had an interesting stage history. To understand him fully we have to go back to the comedy of masks that had fully developed in Italy by the time of the Renascence. This comedy was a special kind of play, the scenario of which only was written, the dialogue being improvised by the individual players. Each player wore a costume and a mask that never changed, and these fixed his identity. Most of the parts had a strong local flavor, the pedant, for example, hailing from Bologna, the overly shrewd merchant, from Venice. Many of the characters have become fixed types and reappear under their old names in various forms of modern drama. Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Punch and Judy, and Pierrot are among those who live on in modern drama. There is an enchanting play by Granville Barker and Dion Clayton Calthrop called The Harlequinade, that describes in a popular way the devious and uncertain paths traveled by these stock characters down the ages.

A one-act farce, The Quod Wrangle, is the only other published play of Oliphant Down's. Its plot, as outlined in The London Times of March 4, 1914, reminds one strongly of O. Henry's The Cop and the Anthem.

The Maker of Dreams at The Neighborhood Playhouse, designed by Aline Bernstein.