June 3, 9, 10, 1956
From the vast store of drama, comedy and romance of The Arabian Nights, Arthur Knoblauch fashioned Kismet, the story of Hajj, the beggar. His adventures during one fateful day take him from his beggar's stone to the market places, the courtyards, the dungeons, the palaces and harems of Baghdad. This production was not the musical. Director Earl Kelly adapted it for the Forest Theatre stage:
"Kelly's real genius was in ... casting some 60 different parts from his notes and, in only a few rehearsals for most of the cast, making a coherent and unified play that told a story and held an audience through a pouring rain.
"It has been a beautiful spring and summer. There were only two weekends early in June that we remember rain. We remember those two weekends very clearly though, because they were the days of the annual Mountaineer play.
"This year it was `Kismet,' an Arabian Nights drama of the rise and fall of a swashbuckling beggar named Hajj. Kismet means fate or destiny or, as Byron Fish prophetically translated it in his column about the play, `Who cares if it rains?' Apparently some of our audience did care, for several of them stayed away.
"Because it was raining so hard on the first performance, the cast did not have the usual warm-up rehearsal and went on cold, in more ways than one. We spent the morning huddling under the scanty shelter available and digging ditches in the stage to allow the puddles to drain off. About 150 people, including the ushers and members of the ground crew, watched while it rained steadily. After the curtain call the cast applauded the audience for being such good sports.
"Many of the Players felt the play was doomed from the start because we did not have our traditional sacrifice to the rain god, Jupiter Pluvius, with appropriate songs. The ceremonies, which were scheduled to take place two weeks before the play, were rained out....
"The set that caused the most concern was the pool in which the villain (the Wazir) was to be drowned. Since this was an important part of the script ... [building] a pool became one of the first orders of business.... We got our water from the regular supply for the cabin.... In order to avoid any reactions not called for in the script when the villain hits the icy spring water ... we heated the water by pumping it through an old-fashioned sidearm hot water heater burning bottled gas. Temperatures of 70 degrees and higher were easily obtained in six hours."
[Morris Moen,
The Mountaineer, 1956]
