Your Name
The Due Date
Class title and section number
Essay 1: Crossing Genres
Word Count: Put your word count here when you are done.
“The Traveling Salesman: An Adaptation of ‘Good Country People’”
Characters:
Hulga (Joy) Hopewell
Mrs. Hopewell, her mother.
Mrs. Freeman, the Hopewells’ neighbor and tenant
Manley Pointer, a travelling Bible salesman
SCENE 1
The lights come up on the left half of the stage. Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman sit at a kitchen
table appropriate to the American South in the 1930s. Both women have breakfast dishes and
coffee cups in front of them. Behind them is a stove with a frying pan on one burner and a shelf
with period appropriate canned goods and kitchen implements. When the play begins, the
conversation has clearly been going for quite some time.
MRS. FREEMAN: (proudly) She thrown up again four times after supper, and was up twice in
the night after three o’clock.
MRS. HOPEWELL: She’s got to eat.
MRS. FREEMAN: I’m sure she will, once her stomach’s settled. My stomach settled when I
was in my fourth month with both my girls.
MRS. HOPEWELL: I still say you should keep at her to eat.
MRS. FREEMAN: Say it all you like, but I think I’ll wait for her stomach to settle.
MRS. HOPEWELL: Well, it takes all kinds to make the world.
MRS. FREEMAN: I always said so myself.
Off stage, the slow thumping of Hulga coming downstairs with her wooden leg is heard. At the
first thump, Mrs. Hopewell frowns sourly, and Mrs. Freeman calmly lifts her coffee cup to her
lips.
MRS. HOPEWELL: I don’t know why she makes such a racket. I just know she does it to be
ugly. Not like your girls. Carramae and Glynesse are both fine girls, and I can’t think of any
who are better.
The thumping grows louder, and Hulga enters from the left side of the stage. She is dressed in
plain, frumpy clothes, and her wooden leg swings ponderously with every step. She ignores the
other two women and faces the stove, as if making eggs in the frying pan.
MRS. FREEMAN: Say, I thought I saw a young man coming around your house yesterday. I
thought to myself, “He looks like a stranger,” so I kept him in mind to ask you about him this
morning.
MRS HOPEWELL: Oh, he was just a Bible salesman. Simple boy, really. Good country
people, but I didn’t have much need for what he was selling.
MRS. FREEMAN: You don’t say. Well, I just thought I should ask, since I saw him talking to
Hulga and wondered what on earth he’d have to say to her.
Mrs. Hopewell looks sharply at Hulga, who is not responding at all to the conversation going on
behind her.
MRS. HOPEWELL: I would dearly like to know what she said to him. Listen, he wasn’t here
more than a few minutes, and he showed up just after breakfast…
The lights go down, and country music appropriate to the period plays while actresses move and
change.
SCENE 2
The lights come up on Hulga, Mrs. Freeman, and Mrs. Hopewell in the kitchen, but Hulga is now
wearing a ratty bathrobe, and Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman have changed positions to show
that this is a different day—the day the salesman came to the door. As the lights brighten, a
sharp knock is heard offstage.
MRS. HOPEWELL: Come on in!
Manley Pointer enters the kitchen. He is a tall, lanky young man with a suitcase in one hand and
a Bible under the other arm. Everything about him suggests sincerity and politeness
MANLEY POINTER: Good morning, Mrs. Cedars.
MRS. HOPEWELL: I’m Mrs. Hopewell.
MANLEY POINTER: (bashfully) Oh, well it said “The Cedars” on the sign down the lane, so I
figured that you were Mrs. Cedars.