About

In 1916, when Pendleton King finished the script for Cocaine, the papers described it as a “gritty portrait of addiction, poverty, and urban desperation, following two down-and-out characters struggling to survive in a New York tenement.” King was born to a wealthy aristocratic family from Georgia and a graduate of Oxford University. However, despite his upbringing and wealth, he was also a known eccentric. He chose to live in New York’s poorest neighborhoods and immersed himself in the subjects he wrote about.

A play so rooted in urban realism was relatively rare in American theatre at that time, and when the Provincetown Players chose it for their inaugural New York season, it was understandably met with condemnation by supporters. Depictions of drug dependency, discussions of prostitution (especially male prostitution), and its portrayal of urban poverty without moralizing the characters had producers fearing the worst. Despite their fears, the Provincetown Players went ahead with the piece and the play went on to be a surprise hit in March of 1917.

One month after the production, Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany and King was immediately drafted.  He would make it home from the war, with honors, but within a few weeks he would be dead at age 29. His official cause of death is still debated, but the most probable cause I can find is a brain aneurysm.  What more King could have offered to the theatre world will never be known, but what he did leave is stark portrait that feels both ahead of its time and familiar in our own time.

Though the production you will see is not King’s original script, the changes I made were mostly to remove language that would date the piece to the point of distraction. Expressions like “Gee-Ta” that can be found in original would likely serve as a mechanism to take modern audiences out of the piece. So, the changes are a concerted effort to represent King’s vision as audiences of the time might have experienced it. You can be the judge as to whether we’ve been successful.