ABSTRACT
Marcus Cook Connelly was the first son of Patrick Joseph and Mabel Cook Connelly. In McKeesport, Connelly's father ran the White Hotel, which hosted many touring companies; contact with the actors and his father's own stage experience helped foster Connelly's ambitions to be an actor himself. Connelly left school in 1907, at seventeen, to go to Pittsburgh to become a writer. There he worked on various newspapers for nearly eight years and tried his hand at verse and musical comedy lyrics. Connelly realized his own acting ambitions in 1944 with the role of Stage Manager in the New York production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and in the London production in 1946. Marc Connelly's life as a man of letters spanned over fifty years; his writings include plays, short fiction, screenplays, a novel, and a memoir. According to Connelly, the play "is an attempt to present certain aspects of a living religion in the terms of its believers".
