by Mark Twain, enacted by Davie’s players

As we pay tribute to the sacrifices of those who defend us on Memorial Day weekend, Davies’ dramatists will enact Mark Twain’s The War Prayer as scripted by Paul Hale.  The piece was left unpublished by Mark Twain at his death in April 1910, largely due to pressure from his family, who feared that the story would be considered sacrilegious. When his illustrator Dan Beard asked him if he would publish it anyway, Twain replied, “No, I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” Mindful of public reaction, he considered that he had a family to support and did not want to be seen as a lunatic or fanatic. “The War Prayer” was finally published in the 1923 anthology Europe and Elsewhere.