Play
The play is named for a summit overlooking the Tappan Zee portion of New York's Hudson River, near where Anderson lived in Rockland County. The story was inspired by the real life controversy over quarrying the palisades along the lower Hudson. The play also shares the plot element of a ghostly crew of Dutch sailors on the Hudson with Washington Irving's short story Rip Van Winkle.
Anderson began writing the play in May 1936. It was first presented on any stage in Cleveland, Ohio, in December 1936, with Burgess Meredith (Anderson's neighbor in Rockland County) and Peggy Ashcroft in the lead roles. The production moved to Broadway ten days later in January 1937, where it played 171 performances. Anderson won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the best American play of the 1936–1937 season. The award included this citation:
- In its decision the circle celebrates the advent of the first distinguished fantasy by an American in many years. Imaginative and as comic as it is poetic in both spirit and expression, High Tor is a singular accomplishment, giving rare grace to this theatrical season in New York.
In 1942, Anderson helped organize and served as the chairman of the Rockland County Committee To Save High Tor, which helped raise money to purchase the property in 1943 for the creation of a public park.
Read more about this topic: High Tor
Famous quotes containing the word play:
“A bestial and violent man will go so far as to kill because he is under the influence of drink, exasperated, or driven by rage and alcohol. He is paltry. He does not know the pleasure of killing, the charity of bestowing death like a caress, of linking it with the play of the noble wild beasts: every cat, every tiger, embraces its prey and licks it even while it destroys it.”
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
“when the moment comes
we’ll talk turkey,
we’ll shoot words straight from the hip,
we’ll play it as it lays.
Yes,
when death comes with its hood
we won’t be polite.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)