Early plays At the University of North Carolina, Margaret Bland became an active member of the Carolina Playmakers, now known as the
PlayMakers Repertory Company. Her first notable work was a one-act
folk drama entitled
Lighted Candles. Based on a true story, it concerns a young mountain woman who had been deserted by her husband and who had reluctantly accepted the proposal of a new suitor. Haunted by memories of her fugitive spouse, she spends her wedding night staring at candles she has lighted in the vain hope of welcoming him back home. Produced and published in 1927, the drama was performed a number of times by the Playmakers in succeeding years. The Drama Workshop in Atlanta performed a three-act version of
Lighted Candles in 1930, of which a reviewer in the
Atlanta Journal wrote, "Its characters, instead of being stereotyped or standardized as such too often have been, are true Southern highlanders, not only in speech and manner but in the doings of mind and heart--they are individuals all." Frederick Koch, founder and director of the Carolina Playmakers, said of the dialogue in
Lighted Candles that "much of the conversation the author has remembered and cherished for us [is] in this play." Rodney Crowther, in an article in the
Asheville Citizen, wrote that "Margaret Bland had accomplished something comparable in beauty to many of the same sort of brief studies for which
Guy de Maupassant in his short stories became so famous." Bland wrote another one-act play,
Pink and Patches, in 1928. Also based on characters living in a remote area of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it concerns a teenage girl who yearns for a pink dress and a society woman from the outside world who brings her an old, patched garment as a present. The
comedy was an immediate success, winning a prize in an international competition in New York City.
Richard Lockridge, writing in
The New York Sun, called it "an imaginative thing, a little overburdened with
dialect but original and by no means badly conceived or executed." It was frequently performed, mostly by school groups, for several decades after it was first published. In 1960, it was the inspiration for a short musical play,
A Pink Party Dress, written by Mark Bucci and David Rogers and published in an acting edition by Samuel French.
Francophilia In the late 1920s, having become a devoted
Francophile and an accomplished Francophone, Margaret Bland made her first trip to France. She would return often throughout her life, sometimes staying for extended periods. She usually spent most of her time in Paris, studying subtleties of the language and the structure of dramatic literature.
Married life and later career In 1930, Margaret Bland left Yale Drama School, returned to the South, and married Frank Anderson Sewell, a widowed insurance executive with two daughters. Family lore says that he had pursued her unsuccessfully before she left for New Haven, but then eventually appeared there carrying an almost life-size bust of
Dante, her favorite poet, which apparently convinced her to marry him. They were married at her mother's home in Charlotte and eventually settled in Atlanta. Stepmother to two girls, Sallie and Julia, and mother to two children of her own, Edith and Frank Jr., she not only managed a busy domestic household but continued to write and publish plays and poems under her maiden name. She also served on the faculty of nearby Agnes Scott College, her alma mater, where she taught classes in both playwriting and French. For a time, she conducted independent research on
Eugène Ionesco, the Romanian-French playwright who was one of the foremost figures of the avant-garde Parisian theater, the
Theatre of the Absurd. She was also actively affiliated with the Alliance Française and the
American Association of Teachers of French. Later in life, as a member of the Executive Committee of the biracial
Georgia Council on Human Relations, she became active in efforts to promote
racial equality in the South. As a socially conscious person, she was dedicated to working with black Americans to help them overcome obstacles in the
voter registration process.
Later plays Two of Margaret Bland's later plays were particularly successful. In 1935, she published
First at Bethel, a play about an incident in a small Southern town. The time is 1928. An aging Confederate veteran is prevented from marching in a reunion parade with his buddies by his officious daughter-in-law, on grounds that he is too old and weak to march. He is bitterly disappointed. But some young people tell the mayor of the town that the old man has been denied his fondest wish, whereupon the mayor invites him to ride in the official car, ahead of everyone else. After some delays in starting the parade, his final words show his pride in his service to the South during the Civil War. "Let 'em wait. Ain't they holding up this whole confounded parade for me? Me, that was first at
Bethel, farthest at
Gettysburg, and last at
Appomatox." The band plays "
Dixie" as the curtain falls. In 1951, in
Land and Larnin', Bland returned to her early interest in the Southern highlanders of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sixteen-year-old Hessie lives with her mother on hardscrabble mountain land, which is difficult to farm without a man. Her ma wants her to marry a young widower with adjoining bottom land, but Hessie is reluctant. Her teacher has instilled in her a love of learning, and she longs to get away to a different life where she can pursue higher education. She is desolate at the thought of settling down with an uneducated man in a monotonous and brutal existence. Her old granny is sympathetic to her plight and helps her get away to a new life. The theme of young people yearning to escape the isolation of the high mountains is recurrent in Bland's Appalachian folk dramas. ==Bibliography==