Needles and Pins

Needles and Pins (1880), a “comedy of the present” by Augustin Daly. [Daly's Theatre, 79 perf.] The pushy Mrs. Vandusen ( Fanny Morant) is determined to marry off her weak son Kit ( John Brand) to a rich lady, although Kit loves the poor piano teacher Mary Forrest ( May Fielding). She is also determined to marry off her aging sister Dosie Heffron ( Mrs. G. H. Gilbert), to anybody who will have her so that Silena Vandusen ( Ada Rehan), Mrs. Vandusen's daughter, may then be free to wed. In revealing her plans to Mr. Vandusen ( Charles Fisher) she lets slip that she knows he himself once loved a poor piano teacher named Silena and later persuaded his wife to name their daughter after his lost love. Miss Forrest comes into a huge inheritance and decides to do good deeds with her new wealth. She, too, has learned of the old romance and instructs her young lawyer, Tom Versus ( John Drew), to make Silena and Vandusen rich enough to marry, not realizing that both have long since married others. Because young Kit had been named for his father, a series of mistaken identities transpires, made all the more complicated when the characters meet at a masked ball. In the end, of course, everything is happily resolved when Mrs. Vandusen learns that Mary is now quite eligible to marry Kit. Tom marries Silena; Dosie seems to snare an elderly collector of bric‐a‐brac, Nicholas Geagle ( James Lewis); and Mr. and Mrs. Vandusen can finally look forward to some wedded bliss after long married years of living on needles and pins. The comedy was loosely adapted from J. Rosen's Starke Mitteln. Daly's biographer brother noted that it was this play “in which Miss Rehan, Mr. Drew, Mrs. Gilbert, and Mr. Lewis were first recognized as the famous quartet which for so many seasons endeared Daly's Theatre to the public.”