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:
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)
“One way to think about play, is as the process of finding new combinations for known things—combinations that may yield new forms of expression, new inventions, new discoveries, and new solutions....It’s exactly what children’s play seems to be about and explains why so many people have come to think that children’s play is so important a part of childhood—and beyond.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“There’s none
Can truly say he gives if he receives.
If our betters play at that game, we must not dare
To imitate them; faults that are rich are fair.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)