Opening on 13 March 1911 at the 39th Street Theatre, the Shubert-produced play, written and directed by Augustus Thomas, ran for 128 performances. Taking up issues that had been explored in the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg's The Father (1887, produced in New York in 1912) and in Rachel Crothers's A Man's World (1910), Thomas explored the double standard and the torment of a husband who begins to doubt whether he is the biological father of his child. Chrystal Herne played the wife who has already forgiven her husband's extramarital escapades, yet he sends her out of her home for an innocent impropriety. As the wife's friend observes: "And that woman dramatist with her play was right. It is 'a man's world.'" Religious considerations are intertwined with the main action, in that several of the characters are Jewish, notably the good doctor, played by John Mason, who is instrumental in saving the marriage of his Christian friends, while the wife's father is outspokenly anti-Semitic.
See also ethnicity in american drama; women in the profession.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.