The Pi Eta Play

The dress rehearsal of the Pi Eta play "Queen Philippine" will be held in the club theatre tonight at 8 o'clock. The Graduates' Night performance comes next Friday; the Boston matinee at the Hollis Street Theatre will be on April 17 and the Cambridge performances on April 22 and 23. After today tickets for the Boston performance may be obtained at the box office and at Herrick's; tickets for Cambridge performance will be on sale at Thurston's.

Every evening for more than a week the opera has been fully rehearsed, with the result that it is now running very smoothly. A. W. Denison '03 has secured great variety in the music and has made all of it catchy and tuneful. The score is unusually large for a college production,--twenty-three musical numbers in all. The librettists, R. E. Edwards '02 and P. L. Coonley '03, have departed from the example set last year in "The Viking," by making the plot less logical, but funnier; and they have introduced more than the usual number of specialties. Three of the best are the Filipino quartette dance, the butterfly dance and a Japanese sword dance by H. Ohashi '03.

The scene of the play is in the Philippines on the Island of Tavolara, which is ruled ostensibly by the avaricious King Philippine, but really by his prime minister, Prince Ping Pong. The King's father, on his death-bed, charged the present monarch to abdicate after reigning twenty-five years, unless he married before the expiration of that period. The twenty-five years expire on the day after the play opens, and the king, worried by the thought of abdicating, is trying to find a wife. He proposes first to Mrs. Sarah Belium, the missionary, and then to her niece, Marion Hayste. Being spurned by both, he resigns himself to abdication and determines to appoint as successor the man whom his ward, the Princess Anita, chooses for a husband.

The prime minister is her only suitor at present, but the number is soon increased by the arrival of John de Breeze, a young American, and Lord Chichester, with his valet, Mackintosh. Chichester wants to buy the island for a tea plantation, but the king will not listen to him because he cannot pay cash. The other arrival, de Breeze, is the agent for an American trust which proposes to annex every country to its neighbor. He wants the king to come into the monopoly. King Philippine, however, has other aims. He thinks de Breeze would make a most suitable king and a good husband for Anita, and he tries to bring about the match. The Princess has taken a great liking to de Breeze, so that it seems feasible. By this move, Ping Pong and Chichester see their hopes of securing possession spoiled, and both determine to gain their ends by strategy.

By a coincidence they hit on the same scheme. Each disguises himself as king, that he may appoint himself the successor to the throne. Mackintosh, who has orders from Chichester to get the real king out of the way, seizes Ping Pong by mistake. The prisoner escapes only to run headlong into the Englishman. Each takes the other for the king; each discovers his mistake just as the real king enters. Philippine thinks his doubles must be due to over-indulgence in wine. To his great relief, de Breeze comes to the rescue and denounces the conspirators; and the king finds this a suitable opportunity to give the crown to the American, who is only too glad to make the Princess his "Queen Philippine."