The Beaver Coat is a text clearly best suited to stage performance, due to its need for utilizing scene changes as a means of allowing the audience to figure out what happened on their own without having to be explicitly told, which is in most cases a limitation of the classic novel or story. For the play to be interesting to the audience, it has to be able to hold their attention, and in the case of The Beaver Coat, Hauptmann takes an interactive approach.
When the play opens, there's a mildly entertaining, though initially seemingly drear, discussion underway between the members of some folks living in a village just outside Berlin. (Their rural lifestyle is made clear by their use of diction in the translation.) This theme continues (See what I'm saying about a boring scene?) until a conflict is established, though somewhat vaguely, in that the family doesn't have the firewood they're needing for the cold weather. The family's financial struggle combined with this need for heating during the cold weather allows for the introduction of the dramatic irony while Mrs. Wolff attempts to harmlessly remedy her situation. The interactivity begins here, with the audience wondering how the conflicts will end up being resolved.
The major reveal comes when the audience first finds out that Mrs. Wolff stole the wood, which could be at one of two places: 1. if the audience is clever enough to piece together both the attention given by Mrs. Wolff to the wood that Krüger has laying in front of his garden and the second scene consisting of the revelation that someone had indeed stolen said wood (Which, admittedly, isn't that difficult to be made aware of.) 2. when in the set in the third scene the wood is explicitly seen as a part of the set of the Wolff home. While the audience never explicitly sees the act of Mrs. Wolff taking the wood, as a result of the scene changes and omission of the act from what the audience sees, they're left hanging on and making their own determination, as the truth is fed to them bit by bit.
The second instance of interactivity is the sudden introduction of the linened package in scene four, as the audience knows nothing of its existence up to this point, and certainly no indication as to what it contains. This detail is another point that the audience can get fixated on, driving their interest, in what is almost a reverse-dramatic irony situation, where the audience doesn't have a clue what's going on, but the key characters on stage do.
With these two situations serving as simple examples, Hauptmann's play contains simple devices, merely in the construction and placement of abrupt and seemingly long scene changes, that nearly force the audience into paying attention, simply on the fixation on that which they have no capacity to know. In this way, it almost isn't fair, as a means of hopeless captivation.
For me, I can't recall ever reading a play that such detailed descriptions of the scenery. It was almost distracting at first because I was caught up in trying to figure out "why the curtains were blue", as the saying goes.
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