Charles Nevers Holmes

Charles Nevers Holmes turned out short comedies for amateur companies in the years around the Great War. Their First Quarrel came in 1916, Smith's Unlucky Day in 1917, A Paper Wedding in 1919 and The Star Boarder in 1920, several of them from T. S. Denison and Company of Chicago, the house that supplied acting editions to schools, churches and small-town clubs. The scale is domestic and deliberately modest: Please Pass the Cream, printed in 1918, runs twenty minutes, uses a single dining room and needs two players, a self-made man and his wife, a former schoolteacher, seated at breakfast. Holmes wrote for Scientific American as well, on the smallness of the earth and on the earth's outer layer in 1917, and on the heart and on breathing in 1921.