Brook's Namesake

BROOK EVANS--Susan Glaspell--Stokes ($2.50).

Naomi and Joe are forbidden to "keep company," but they meet by the starbright brook, and plan to marry when the hay is in. Not till weeks after Joe has been killed horribly in an accident, does Naomi realize to her joy that he lives on in the child she bears. But her joyless parents, stiff-necked with the sour self-righteous Protestantism of the '80s, snatch up the offer of "noble" Caleb to take Naomi and give her bastard a name. Naomi suffers untold husbandly violations from Caleb, but comforts herself that some day she will tell Brook, her daughter and Joe's, of the beautiful passion by the gay brook for which the child was named.

She does so at an inopportune moment. Brook has been forbidden by Caleb to dance and love Tony, foreigner, Catholic. But Naomi, frantic lest Brook miss the great love she herself had known so fleetingly, tells Brook why she need not obey her "father." In a frenzy of dutiful adolescent loyalty to this man who had treated her as his own, Brook escaped from Tony to Constantinople with a missionary friend of Caleb, and not till years later did she realize what her mother had wished for her. For luckily an English husband rescued her from the missionaries, and later a lover in Paris rescues her from her duty. That she is glad to be rescued, in spite of criticism, consummates at last her mother's ideal of joyous living. Author Glaspell advocates this pagan ideal superfluously. But whatever her "message," she draws with poignancy the conflict and reconciliation between mother and daughter.