In 1889 “The Free Stage Society” was formed in Berlin; it was, in a way, “an imitation of Antoine’s Free Theatre, organized two years before,” says Barrett H. Clark in _A Study of the Modern Drama_.[79] Among the founders were Otto Brahm, Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff and others who wished to produce plays of varied types, especially the work of naturalistic writers. Hauptmann came under the influences of Bruno Wille, the socialist, and Arno Holz, the dramatist; certain reactions from this companionship of minds may be traced in his plays _Before Dawn_, _Colleague Crampton_, and _Florian Geyer_. Brahm was the director of this Free Stage Society which, in 1894, after fulfilling its mission for Germany, was merged into the Deutsches Theatre. Among the plays by Hauptmann written under this stimulus, in addition to the three mentioned above, were _The Festival of Peace_, _Lonely Lives_, _The Weavers_, _The Beaver Coat_, and _The Assumption of Hannele_. _Before Dawn_, written in the Silesian mountains and staged in Berlin, in 1889, was a haunting tragedy with loose construction. The ribald father and his low associates, and the daughter, who kills herself to escape assault at their hands, combine to make a gripping, repulsive story with certain dramatic possibilities that are not fulfilled. _The Weavers_ showed progress in technic and characterization of a group. Here no single individual plays the leading part; the group of weavers, the mob at the time of crisis, are the principal actors. There are marked contrasts in setting between the home of the rich capitalist and the poverty of the weavers, between the government’s indifference and the industrial slavery of the victims of rapacity. One of the most poignant passages is the monologue of old Ansorge, in Act II; he cannot believe that the King will fail to help them, if word is sent to him of their needs. When Jaeger assures him it is futile, that the rich people are as “cunning as the devil,” his lament for the home that must be sacrificed, where his father sat at the loom for more than forty years, is pathetic and dramatic.