Stark Young, dramatist and critic, the author of The Twilight Saint, was born in Como, Mississippi, on October 11, 1881. He was graduated from the university of his native state and a year later took his master's degree at Columbia University. From 1907 to 1915 he taught at the University of Texas, and from 1915 to 1921 he was professor of English at Amherst College. His travels have taken him to Greece, and to Spain, and to Italy where he has lingered, making a special study of the native drama.
The text of The Twilight Saint has undergone revision by the author since its first appearance. It was acted in 1918 with Madretta, another of the author's plays, at the dramatic school of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, under the direction of Thomas Wood Stevens. The author writes: "The only instruction I should like to propose is that the actor of St. Francis keep him very simple, not get him moralizing and long-faced. In Egan's book on St. Francis[49] there is a picture of the preaching to the birds in which Boutet de Monvel shows a Tuscan type that is my idea of the man simplified." The play itself suggests charming by-ways of literature that lead in one direction perhaps to Hewlett's Earthwork Out of Tuscany and Josephine Preston Peabody's The Wolf of Gubbio, and in another possibly to the Saint's own Little Flowers, and Canticle to the Sun.
THE TWILIGHT SAINT
- CHARACTERS
- Guido, the husband, a young poet.
- Lisetta, his wife.
- Pia, a neighbor woman.
- St. Francis of Assisi.
In the year 1215 A.D.
A room in Guido's house, on a hillside near Bevagna. It is a poor apartment, clumsily kept. On your left near the front is a bed; on the floor by the bed lie scattered pages of manuscript. A table littered with manuscripts and crockery stands against the back wall of the room to the right. On the right hand wall is a big fireplace with copper vessels and brass. A bench sits by the fireplace and several stools about the room. On the stone flags two sheepskins are spread.
Through the open door in the middle of the back wall rises the slope of a hill, green with spring and starred with flowers. A stream is visible through the grass and the drowsy sound of the water fills the air. The late yellow sunlight falls through a window over the bed like gilding and floods the hill without.
Lisetta lies on the bed, still, her eyes closed. Pia sits on the ingle bench, halfway in the great fireplace, shelling peas. She is a little peasant woman with a kerchief on her head and a wrinkled face as brown as a nut.
Guido sits at the table, his face to the wall, his chin on his palm.