As a spotlight picked them out, each one, without rising, would recite one of the poems, sometimes looking across to others referred to in the lines. Under a starry night sky, the troupe of twenty-five, mostly from Chicago’s Actors Company, sat staggered across the stage like tombstones. It took place in Masters’s New Salem, Illinois, on a Greek-style, open-air stage, with a permanent backdrop of log cabins, used for the season’s other play, a Lincoln piece by E.P. Edgar Lee Masters’s book was first made into a theater piece in the summer of 1954, as the third act of an evening of Prairie poets, including Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, called Spoon River Speaks. Christopher Benfey’s dismissive description of performances of Spoon River Anthology as “aw-shucks…with straw hats and string ties” and his belief that it first appeared on stage on Broadway in 1963 need correction.
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