2
appear)
Act One
Scene One: The Kitchen of the Carmody Home--Evening.
Scene Two: The Reception Room of the Infirmary, Hill Farm Sanatorium--An Evening a Week Later.
Act Two
Scene One: Assembly Room of the Main Building at the Sanatorium--A Morning Four Months Later.
Scene Two: A Crossroads Near the Sanatorium--Midnight of the Same Day.
Act Three
An Isolation Room and Porch at the Sanatorium--An Afternoon Four Months Later.
TIME--1910
The Straw
Act One
Act One: Scene One
The kitchen of the Carmody home on the outskirts of a manufacturing town in Connecticut. On the left, forward, the sink. Farther back, two windows looking out on the yard. In the left corner, rear, the icebox. Immediately to the right of it, in the rear wall, a window opening on the side porch. To the right of this, a china cupboard, and a door leading into the hall where the main front entrance to the house and the stairs to the floor above are situated. On the right, to the rear, a door opening on to the dining room. Further forward, the kitchen range with scuttle, wood box, etc. In the centre of the room, a table with a red and white cloth. Four cane-bottomed chairs are pushed under the table. In front of the stove, two battered wicker rocking chairs. The floor is partly covered by linoleum strips. The walls are papered a light cheerful colour. Several old framed picture-supplement prints hang from nails. Everything has a clean, neatly-kept appearance. The supper dishes are piled in the sink ready for washing. A saucepan of water simmers on the stove.
It is about eight o'clock in the evening of a bitter cold day in late February of the year 1912.
As the curtain rises, Bill Carmody is discovered fitting in a rocker by the stove, reading a newspaper and smoking a blackened clay pipe. He is a man of fifty, heavy-set and round-shouldered, with long muscular arms and swollen-veined, hairy hands. H