The Sangamon River flows through Petersburg.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The Spoon River is near Lewistown, Illinois, not Petersburg. Readers have informed me that I mixed up the geography of the two towns in which Masters grew up. As Jason Stacy confirms in Spoon River America, “The best-known theatrical adaptation of Spoon River Anthology was Charles Aidman’s 1963 Broadway version,” with its “folk music score and attendant homespun-and-string-tie costuming.” I did not mean to suggest that the Broadway adaptation, which I noted “was first mounted on Broadway in 1963,” was the earliest but merely the most influential. Medford, Massachusetts Christopher Benfey replies:ĭramatic versions of Spoon River Anthology were staged even before the 1954 production Laurence Senelick remembers so vividly. I know because at the age of twelve I was a member of that company.įletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory Surrounded by the woods, cornfields, and graveyards of Sangamon County, with the cool of night drawing on, the effect was ghostly and deeply moving.
As a spotlight picked them out, each one, without rising, would recite one of the poems, sometimes looking across to others referred to in the lines. Under a starry night sky, the troupe of twenty-five, mostly from Chicago’s Actors Company, sat staggered across the stage like tombstones. It took place in Masters’s New Salem, Illinois, on a Greek-style, open-air stage, with a permanent backdrop of log cabins, used for the season’s other play, a Lincoln piece by E.P. Edgar Lee Masters’s book was first made into a theater piece in the summer of 1954, as the third act of an evening of Prairie poets, including Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, called Spoon River Speaks. Christopher Benfey’s dismissive description of performances of Spoon River Anthology as “aw-shucks…with straw hats and string ties” and his belief that it first appeared on stage on Broadway in 1963 need correction.
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