Part 435: Thomas G. Moses and “Lights of Home”
In 1902, Thomas G. Moses recorded that he created settings for “Lights of Home,” “The Village Postmaster,” and “Shadows of a Great City.”
“Lights of Home” was a new play by Lottie Parker Blaire that did not open until the fall of 1903. The show was delayed due to the playwright being ill at the end of 1902. At the beginning of 1903, “The Dayton Herald” reported that the author had just recovered from a recent illness and was currently completing the final act of her play “Lights of Home” (10 January 1903 Page 6).
Blaire was also the author of “Under the Southern Skies” and “Way Down East.” “The Daily Arkansas Democrat” commented that Blaire “stands at the head of women dramatic writers in point of furnishing money-producing plays” (9 July 1903, page 6). The article continued, “It is claimed that the profits of ‘Under the Southern Skies’ and ‘Way Down East’ alone amount to more that the total profits on all other plays combined written by women.” Moses produced the scenery for Blaire’s productions of “Under Southern Skies” and “Lights of Home.”
“Lights of Home” was the season’s house production at Haverly’s 14th Street Theatre in New York during November 1903. This was the production that Moses mentions in his typed manuscript. The four-act play tells the story of a hero, who is cast off by his wealthy father for marrying a penniless girl. The hero’s half brother plays the villain, who accuses the hero of forgery. Fortunately the hero escapes to sea on a sailing vessel. The villain then attempts to murder the hero’s wife and child to gain the inheritance.
The Buffalo Express reported, “It is a thrilling melodrama of perilous situations and gratifying ways of getting the heroine and her child out of them. The poor girl who marries the rich man’s son suffers much through the intriguing of a band of rascals, male and female, headed by the husband’s stepbrother. The story lends itself to elaborate devices in the way of stage scenery, which heightens the effect of the soul-stirring situations” (New York 22 Nov 1904, page 7).
The stage settings included the recreation pier where the child is stolen; a river where an ocean liner almost runs over the child in an open boat; the smuggler’s bluff where the husband is imprisoned; and a cave where the wife is washed into it from sea, but is saved by men forming a human chain with their bodies. “The Anaconda Standard” reported, “One scene showing the rising tide in a cave was wonderfully realistic and thrilling” (Anaconda, Montana, 8 Nov. 1903, page 14). Of the stage action, an article in “The Evening World” questioned, “Why has the human chain been overlooked? Why is it that in the mad whirl of the buzz saw, the locomotive, and the mine explosion drama, nobody ever picked out the human chain as a vehicle of the most enthusiastic possibilities, that is, nobody until Lottie Blair Parker seized it and thrust it bodily into the fourth act of her play…And hurrah for the human chain! (3 Nov. 1903, page 7).
The plot was advertised to include “a knife, a gun, a real warship, a steam launch, a sea scene with a dark unfathomed cave in the background and a deep-dyed villain who talks like “Big Bill” Devery and really acts” (The Evening World, 3 Nov. 1903, page 7).
Forrest Robinson played the role of the hero, Jack Stanton, while Georgia Wells played the heroine Tress Purvis. George D. Parkes played the part of the villain – who could “really act.” Of the performance at Haverly’s Fourteenth Street Theatre, newspapers recorded, “The curtain was scarcely up two minutes when the gallery was whistling; in fifteen minutes it was y-a-a-hing, and in half an hour all the women in the house were enjoying a good social cry”(The Evening World, 3 Nov. 1903, page 7).
The song from the second scene, “On the Recreation Pier,” was a musical number that newspapers repeatedly commented as extremely popular. The “Evening World” noted, “The song will be all over the town in a week” (3 Nov. 1903, page 7).
To be continued…
