How Greed overtakes Need and Nostalgia

This is my conversion of the Rupert Brooke's one-act play_'LITHUANIA', into a story!

How Greed overtakes Need and Nostalgia

This article is a replication of a Play originally enacted at the Chicago Little Theatre on 12^th October 1915. The characters that embody the play are

a)    A Stranger

b)    The Mother

c)     The daughter

d)    The father

e)    A Young Man

f)      A vodka Shopkeeper

g)    The Vodka Shopkeeper’s son

 

The inside of a hut in Lithuania. Table in the centre. To the left of the table, a ladder up to the upper storey. Behind, in the back wall, a long low window. Doors in the right end of the back wall, and near the end of the left wall. Projecting from the right wall, a large stone stove. Beyond it, a dresser with a basin etc. It is early night in autumn. Outside the window is a space of moonlight;  pine trees are vaguely visible beyond.

 

At the left end of the table facing sideways is sitting the stranger, finishing a meal. The daughter is sitting on a stool before the stove, back to the audience, occasionally glancing at the stranger. The mother is moving to and fro with plates, food etc., between the table, the stove, and the dresser. There is a lamp on the table.

 

The stranger says that he is dog-tired after a tramp ( a  long walk across an area) which was evident in his gait.

 

He catches the gloom in the daughter and the mother in a split-of-a-second gaze; and warrants the dullness of their place.

 

Straight out of the forest, the stranger had stumbled upon the house, after walking all day alone among the trees.

 

The house had only-the Daughter, the Mother and the Father. It seems the son had darted when he was just thirteen. It seems he was drowned later on.

 

Let’s wait and watch what actually went on.

 

The Father was a farmer; they wanted to store way for winter, and live off their land.

 

The Mother was kind enough to promise the stranger a bed in their residence.

The Mother and the Daughter were desperately dependent on the father to kill the stranger to sneak off with all the stranger’s riches.

 

But he lingers in the Vodka-shop and they ultimately start getting an undesirable feeling that someone is busy loitering around the house, keeping an eye on them.

 

Although, in general, the stranger was acting queer, they doubt about the amplification by a drink, by his eerie act of climbing down the ladder and saying he wanted to get clear of something, preferably with the father.

 

Fed up, they themselves kill the stranger, instead of waiting for the father’s return. This was followed by rough crashing and deep creaking sounds in the upper storey; produced both due to stealth and brute.

 

Their unmanifested feelings for their undiscovered male member of the house, was visible in their uneven breaths of weeping and gasping. The father was acting totally out of senses, as he’s badly intoxicated, dazed from the open air, unfit to do any job.

 

The shocking revelation that the stranger was in fact, the son, who’d darted and drowned, sets the half-broken family rather traumatized, followed by the straight-forwardness of the Vodka-shopkeeper and the mother, seen in their act of retreating and being honest respectively, and the daughter’s and Vodka shopkeeper’s son’s sly acts of not letting to make known, the reality and slipping out of the door respectively.

 

The assumption of the best present to a mother in the form of her son’s return after twenty years is taken away by the mother’s own greed leaving her regretful and nostalgic about their son for time immemorial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

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