THE WIDOWING OF MRS. HOLROYD is the story of a marriage in trouble. It is the story of a husband trying to escape the scorn and bitterness of a woman who resents the hold he has on her. It is the story of a wife trying desperately to make a safe home for her young children amidst the coarseness of a soot-blackened coal mining village—safe from her drunken husband, from her meddling mother-in-law—and from the passion of the man who wants to take her away.

“This is a moving play about the tension between men and women: the essential misunderstandings and necessary needs,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times in 1973, when the play was presented at the Long Wharf in CT. “It contrasts the power of sexuality with the power of peace. And neither wins…” MRS. HOLROYD was written in 1910 when Lawrence was twenty-five and experiencing his first success as a published poet while still teaching school in a London suburb. It was his second play and it expands upon a tale that Lawrence first told in his short story The Odour of Chrysanthemums which was unpublished when he composed the play.

by D.H. Lawrence. Directed by Stuart Howard. Performances February 4th through March 29th.