Bringing Together "The Beaver Coat" - A Final Act for an Unfinished Plot

 Brandon Q. Day and Stevan L. Hartman

THE PROBLEM

After we (the class members- ourselves included- who seem to be pursuing careers in some area of science, as a whole) read The Beaver Coat, we were mostly quite disappointed with the ending. One reader said that he felt that nothing had been gained by reading this play; another reader had a problem with the fact that justice had not been served to the wrong-doer. Because of these reactions, my partner and I were drawn to this play with the idea of seeing if we could create a new ending for The Beaver Coat that might “fix” the play for us and our fellow classmates. 

THE PURPOSE

What we hope to gain from this project is to see if an ending that provides closure and a sense of justice for the reader gets a better response from the audience. If some readers do not like our ending, but did like The Beaver Coat after we read it earlier in the semester, why? Will those entering the field of science react more positively to this new ending than those going into fields more abstract such as English and history? Dr. Sheehan talked about the two vastly different receptions of the play, as it was originally performed, and how one group absolutely hated it, while another thought it was the best thing since sliced butter. We want to experiment, and see whether adding a closing, final act with resolution would cause these groups to ultimately reverse their opinions. We will provide hypotheses on the outcomes of our experiment, and present them on the board as well. 

THE METHOD

Although we reviewed the idea, we did not like the idea of writing an entire final act for The Beaver Coat, simply because we cannot write in the exact same fashion as Gerhart Hauptmann. We believed that if we had attempted this, the audience would be more affected by the inconsistency of the two contrasting writing styles than the actual content. So, instead we plan to outline the series of events that occur in our final act and tie each event back to instances in The Beaver Coat in order to prove to the audience that the events we come up with are not just “coming out of left field.” The final act will be centered around Mrs Wolff’s daughter Adelheid. The poster we propose will be a visualization of the sequence of events we propose, what we plan to accomplish with the proposal, and the results of our work. Finally, we are throwing around different ideas for creatively delivering the proposed final act. One idea was having Frau Wolff find Adelheid’s hidden journal, where she finds out she’s been betrayed by her daughter for her chance in the spotlight. Can you think of some other suggestions for a means of adequately delivering our proposed plot-line to the class?