New York Publishers Announce Volume of Carolina Folk Plays Written by Chapel Hill Students, Sept. 22, 1922

Carolina Folk Plays Issued from New York. . . Henry Holt & Company Send Out Assessment of Volume

Chapel Hill, Sept. 20—Henry Holt & Co., the New York Publishers, have sent out the announcement of a volume entitled “Carolina Folk Plays,” expected to be off the press within a month or so. It is made up entirely of plays written by undergraduates of the University of North Carolina.

“These plays show unusual ability,” says the Holt announcement. “They are rich in atmosphere, full of the flavor of both the mountains and the sea. Outlaws, moonshiners, ‘revenoors,’ witches and land-pirates provide abundant action and picturesqueness. Perhaps the strongest note, though , is struck in the crushing poverty of ‘Peggy’.”

It is perhaps true, says the publishers, that at Chapel Hill has been created “a school that will do for America what the Abbey Players did for Ireland.” They go on to quote the critic Walter Prichard Eaton as saying that Carolina students “are being taught to write their own plays, about their own people and their lives, stage them, costume them, act them.”

Part of the volume is a paper by Tom Peete Cross on the dialect of the plays. The contents include:

“When Witches Ride” by Elizabeth Lay; “Peggy by Harold Williamson; “Dod Gast Ye Both” by Hubert Heffner; “Off Nag’s Head” by Dougald MacMillan; and “The Last of the Lowica” by Paul Green.

From the front page of The Dunn Dispatch, Sept. 22, 1922. Student Paul Green would go on to write “The Lost Colony,” in 1937, which is still being performed. The Paul Green Theatre, a 500-seat venue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was completed in 1976. The PlayMakers Repertory Company is the professional theatre in residence there.