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

 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 bread. 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 work together to engineer an ending that might be found suitable by the audience that didn’t fancy the original ending in order to show the disparity between the two groups of people. 

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 and the reception of the new ending. We plan to create a “left-brain-friendly” ending that could be added to the end of the existing play. In other words, our proposed ending will not require any changes to any of Hauptmann’s original content.

 The final act will be centered on Mrs Wolff’s daughter, Adelheid, and her growing displeasure with her chances at actually making it into the spotlight, in addition with her growing teenage-borne rebellion.

After some feedback from the class, we have determined that the most effective method by which to deliver the content of our plot is to show a juxtaposition of two timelines, one featuring the progression of events in Hauptmann’s original version of The Beaver Coat, and the second, overlapping timeline will contain our addendum to the existing plot. The two timelines will be complete with links between the two, where we will visually show the viewer where our events fit into the original sequence of events. It will be complete with justifications and citations from the text that support the plot of the newly drawn-up ending.

                To gauge the opinions of the readers, we will take a poll of the class, who have presumably all read the text, requesting that they answer questions about themselves that will help in determining trends in the audience. We will also ask for their feelings on the new ending. Did you like the original play? Do you like the play more with the ending provided? On a scale of 1-5, how left brained do you consider yourself? Etc.

            Finally, the data will be collected and compared with our hypotheses, any trends and notable evidences will be discussed, all of which will also be presented on the board, if it is available by the time of the presentations. Otherwise, the polling will take place on-site, and the data compiled and presented to Dr. Sheehan at his earliest convenience.