Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/250

218 of the company, and I have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that it was the best play new to America presented in America during the winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and "In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of 1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why "Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be "crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap or mean.