About the Play:

The Young and Fair has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Female Scenes.

The Young and Fair is a full-length drama by N. Richard Nash. A former student of a fashionable New England women's college returns as a teacher and discovers her younger sister, a student at the college, falsely accused of stealing by a group of trustees' daughters attempting to cover their own crimes. The Young and Fair is an exciting play for an all-female cast, most of them young.

The Young and Fair tells of the trouble created at Brook Valley Academy for young women, a fashionable girls school near Boston, when the spoiled and dictatorial daughter of an influential trustee succeeds in having an innocent girl accused of the theft. The plot centers around a sincere and intelligent former student, Francis Morritt, who has returned to teach after an absence of some ten years and to enroll her idealistic younger sister, Patty, who enters as a student. The director of the college, a conscientious elderly woman, is responsible to a hard-headed board of directors, one of whom has a daughter who is a student. This student, a bullying, power-hungry girl, uses the threat of her rich father's influence to throw a suspicion of theft on two students, not to mention a servant, all of whom are innocent. One of the students implicated refuses to be blackmailed and the director of the college must face the issue of compromising with her own best standards of right and wrong. Eventually she takes matters into her own hands, and decides – with the help of Francis and Patty – to stand by her principles. The director, though she realizes at last that Francis is right in fighting compromise and deceit, has not the courage to see the fight through to the end, though Francis and Patty do. The Young and Fair is an exciting, fast-moving drama and a timely comment on idealism and personal ethics.

The Young and Fair premiered in 1948 on Broadway in The Fulton Theatre on West 46th Street, and also played at the International Theatre at Columbus Circle in New York. Directed by the legendary Harold Clurman (who launched the plays of Tennessee Williams), the original cast included such notables as Tony-Award winning actor Julie Harris and Mercedes McCambridge. While this large-cast play is rarely performed professionally, it has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is performed in high school and college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 18-21 female

What people say:

"The Young and Fair has a real sense of how thorny and bewildering life can be: an endless emotional seesaw, a constant moral crossroads. It understands, too, how snobbish institutions like Brook Valley help strangle decent impulses." — Time Magazine

"...a tense and lively melodrama with considerable suspense...." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

N. Richard Nash (1913-2000), born Nathan Richard Nusbaum, was a prolific and popular American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and teacher whose greatest success was the tender drama The Rainmaker.