Hymn to the Chesapeake
- 95 Minutes
- 5 Males, 5 Females, Max/Min 10
$11.00 – $90.00
This award-winning, full-length play with music is filled with the poetry of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Robert P. Arthur weaves fragments of conversations and traditional melodies to portray the love and heartbreak of its watermen and women–the love of the sea, a mother for a child, a man for a woman. Easy to stage with a variable cast, this haunting drama can be performed easily by high school, college, community, and professional theaters.
Select Quantities Below
Performance Fee $80.00 A Production License Fee Per Performance (mandatory for all performances)
Apply for Performance RightsPlay Details
Overview
At heart, this musical is a love story on the coastal waters of Eastern Virginia. In and out of time past, present, and future, Tom falls in love with Annie Drummond and revisits his past and his loves–of Annie and of the sea. We fall in love with the lives, humor, and hardships of the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay, hardened to hard times but committed to life on the Shore.
Hymn to the Chesapeake opened at the Trawler Dinner Theater on the Eastern Shore and has had over ninety performances in Virginia and Maryland, as well as performances in Washington, D.C., New York City, and St. Petersburg, Russia. Readings using material from the play possibly exceed the number of actual productions and include readings for libraries, museums, universities, colleges, and literary festivals, as well as the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
The poem/play won Port Folio magazine’s Most Innovative Theater Award. For its creation, the author, Robert P. Arthur, won the Christians in Theater Arts Award.
From the Play
Cast List:
Tom Thatcher, a man in his late thirties
Grandpa, a man in his early sixties
Annie Drummond a woman who plays from sixteen to twenty-five
Aunt Kate, a woman in her sixties
Fishermen, all ages (two or three suggested)
Fisherwomen, all ages (two or three suggested)
Note: Parts in script designated for Fisherman and Fisherwoman are suggested character and voice changes by the author. Directors should determine number of Fishermen and Fisherwomen to be used and designate specific assignments. Also, all of the principle characters may double as Fishermen or Fisherwomen. Hymn can be successfully performed with as few as five cast members and as many as sixteen.
Place: The Eastern Shore of Virginia. A large farmhouse with a porch upstage center. Rocking chairs and planters are scattered about on the porch. Rain slicks for fishing are hanging on the porch railings. The place has not been well maintained, but it’s livable. There is an old pier reaching into the Chesapeake down stage left. Near the pier are crab traps, baskets of clams, nets, oyster shells, etc. At down stage left there is a garden. The scene begins with a dark stage
Play Excerpt:
Fisherman: I remember
When the big freeze came
and left the Patuxent sheeted
in fields of ice
and off the Virginia capes all the dredges
framed
by necklaces of white
Fisherman: I remember
the gusts of freezing rain
the motionless tributaries
the swollen James
the ice breaker Annapolis
chuffing in its track
Fisherman: I remember the big ships—
Kate Darlington
and City of Norfolk–
trapped by the ice’s mass
(Stage grows darker)
Mother’s Voice: Tommy! Tommy. Come in from the weather.
As if from a silence, as if from deep water
and the bootblack cold parlor in the back
of our house, my mother’s voice, surfacing
now, in memory, now dissolving…
Tommy, oh Tommy boy!
Tommy, oh Tommy boy!
Tom: Like ice. My mother listening at night in the cold parlor.
I remember I remember (Sound of foghorn)
Smokey Joe steaming out
in flakes of snow big as a hand
trailing smoke from his stack
Perry of the Love Point Ferry”
to the rescue
from the chill of Love Point
to the balladeers of Baltimore . . .
through the inky dark.
Tom: I remember I remember
Related products
- $9.95 – $80.00
Humans Remain
- 110 Minutes
- 2 Males, 5 Females; 1 African dancer (optional) (small roles are doubled).
A hidden society fearful of the outside. A curious stranger accidentally pulled into their world. A romance that threatens their survival. Humans Remain is a celebration of love, familial responsibility, and honor.
A full-length drama script for a play by Robin Rice, Humans Remain challenges our views on cultural bias, assimilation, values, and assumptions. A well-meaning “foreigner” attempts to rescue the White Cliff Kinfolk – a mixed-race society isolated from civilization in the hills of New Jersey for over 200 years. Love. Death. History. Magic. Nature. Belief. All of these are played out on the stage. All but one character are mixed race, mainly African-American. One character is specified as African-American. The others are as diverse as desired.
Highly theatrical staging possible.
Read More - $11.00 – $80.00
Canterbury Tales
- 90 Minutes
- 3+ Males, 4+ Females, Max Cast 20+, Min Cast 8
This full-length comedy play with music by Gillette Elvgren brings rapid-fire dialogue to an old classic. With a flexible cast, it is ideal as a play for high school performances, college theaters, or community productions. Elvgren has selected the bawdiest and most satiric (greed, lust, envy, avarice) tales for this version. A sense of Chaucer’s language is maintained but accessible to a modern audience.
(Music lead sheets available.)
Read More - $9.97 – $70.00
Distant Survivors
- 60 Minutes
- 4 Males, 1 Female, Max/Min cast 5
In this poetic drama, we see the past through the eyes of a German-American who looks back on his ancestral heritage and tries to come to terms with it. He encounters voices and embodiments of World War II, like echoes from the past and tries to find answers where there are only shadows. Distant Survivors was conceived and adapted for the stage by director June Prager, based on Holocaust poetry by William Heyen.
Read More - $9.00 – $60.00
Nat Turner’s Last Struggle: Finding His Way Home
- 50 - 60 minutes
- 1 Male 1 Female Max/Min 2
This one-act, two character play opens during the pre-dawn hours of November 5, 1831. It is the day that Nat Turner, leader of a bloody slave rebellion, will be tried, convicted and sentenced to death. In the predawn hours before the trial a mysterious woman enters to purify the courtroom. Seven days later she is there by the hanging tree when Turner is executed and thrown into the darkness of death – where he fears he has been eternally abandoned. When Nat is finally given light he struggles to make his case – taking us on a journey where we see a bright, enslaved boy grow into a divinely-inspired freedom fighter. And the mysterious woman is there – stealthily guiding Nat and us to our long-forgotten home.
Read More
