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:
“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“They can play a bugle call like you never heard before,
So natural that you want to go to war.”
—Irving Berlin (1888–1989)
“I bow’d not to thy image for succession,
Nor bound thy bow to shoot reformed kindness,
Thy plays of hope and fear were my confession,
The spectacles to my life was thy blindness;
But Cupid now farewell, I will go play me,
With thoughts that please me less and less betray me.”
—Fulke Greville (1554–1628)