In the play, Lucy Belle fights valiantly her losing fight. Loneliness, poverty, ignorance, terror, drive her from disaster to disaster, from one unwilling infidelity to another. But she never wavers in her soul. In her utter confusion and failure she kills the child that stands between her and all her hopes and at once expiates that action with her own death. Neither the subject nor the circumstances are new. But novelty is no mark of fine literature. The motives, the people, the place, the color of life--these are new. Every triangle play is a “Medea”. There are subjects that are classical because they are native to the character and circumstances of mankind. Such is the subject of “Goat Alley”. The structure is pure and uncompromising. No American play has had a finer or truer moment than that at the end of the second act when Lucy Belle, her lodger lost, her money stolen, her child crying with hunger, consents quietly, yet in such despair, to rent her vacant room to the worthless, ingratiating barber. Hauptmann would not have disdained that quiet moment of rich, tragic implications; Galsworthy would have approved it. No competent observer will fail to note here the evidence of an effort as serious, as intelligent, as sensitive to the character and quality of what makes tragedy as our recent theatre has produced. LUDWIG LEWISOHN. New York, July, 1921. GOAT ALLEY CHARACTERS Lucy Belle Dorsey Slim Dorsey Sam Reed Aunt Rebecca Lizzie Gibbs Jeff Bisbee Chick Avery Jeremiah Pocher Fanny Dorsey } _Children_ Israel Dorsey } Baby Policeman GOAT ALLEY was first publicly presented at the Bijou Theatre, New York City, on the evening of June 20, 1921. ACT I _The curtain rises on the sitting-room of a Negro’s squalid dwelling in Goat Alley, Washington, D. C. At Right Back, there is a door giving directly on the street and when it is open one gets a glimpse of the miserable, tumble-down houses on the opposite side. At Left Back is a window, with one pane broken and an old shirt stuffed in the hole. The one or two old rag-carpet rugs which lie on the floor serve only in a small measure to cover its bareness. Several old, broken and battered chairs stand here and there about the room. At Left Center is a door leading into the other downstairs room of the house. Between it and the wall, Back, is a door opening into a closet._