The Boarding House
- 40 Minutes
- 1 Male, 3 Females
Colleges, Community, Fundraiser, High School
$7.95 – $50.00
A one-act play, The Boarding House is a dramatic satire, by David.H. Klein, of the story by James Joyce. Mrs. Mooney, the owner of a boarding house of questionable reputation, exploits the wiles of her daughter Polly and the power of the Church to snare one of her more respectable boarders as her potential son-in-law.
Play Details
Overview
Mrs. Mooney, the proprietor of the boarding-house and the mother of Polly, wields her cleaver with panache. She has set her sites on one of her boarders as a potential husband for her daughter. Polly, a reluctant (?) temptress.
Polly finds a way to implicate him in a possibly compromising situation. With the power of the Church behind her, Mrs. Mooney sets out to close the trap on Bob and “save” her daughter’s reputation.
This is a play about powerlessness, social opinion, paralysis, the Church, and marriage. Mrs. Mooney waits until Polly builds a relationship with someone (Bob) that Mrs. Mooney considers of a good social class or a person with opportunities and potential–someone who would take Polly off her hands and marry her.
Although Polly has interacted with other gentlemen in the boarding house, it is Bob who is baited for the trap. But who is baiting the trap? Mrs. Mooney or Polly?
The importance of social opinion to Bob and Mrs. Mooney is demonstrated when Polly is called to talk to her mother and Bob. What Bob says to Polly isn’t revealed, but it is likely that he carried out Mrs. Mooney’s instructions.
Bob knows that it is easier to marry Polly than have people talking about him, particularly his employer, the Church and the other lodgers in Mrs. Mooney’s boarding house. Bob is marrying Polly simply out of fear of what others will say about him if he fails to marry her.
This play is included in the volume An Evening with Joyce’s Women along with another two adaptations from Dubliners
All three James Joyce adaptations in one volume – An Evening With Joyce’s Women
Other one-act play adaptations from Dubliners:
The Dead
Eveline
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