Darling Mine

A blithe Celtic breeze, embodied by the incandescent Olive Thomas, wafts across the Atlantic and lands in the soot-streaked labyrinth of Lower Manhattan, where scarlet bricks sweat gin and hallway gaslights flicker like guilty consciences. Darling Mine is less a tidy narrative than a tremulous watercolor of collisions: emerald optimism collides with Bowery cynicism, Prohibition bile, and Broadway tinsel, all filtered through the prism of a lost 1919 silent that somehow still exhales celluloid perfume. Kitty McCarthy—wide-eyed yet flinty—arrives clutching her aunt’s impassioned scrawl, a letter promising milk, honey, and stardom; instead she finds Aunt Agnes pickled in a rail-thin tenement, spirit corked inside a brown bottle. What follows is not rescue but resurrection, a slow-motion miracle of cupped sunlight: Kitty sponges grime from windows, coaxes song from parched lungs, and, by sheer force of auroral will, drags the older woman back into the land of the vertical. Enter Gordon Davis, a playwright whose fountain pen drips equal parts acid and starlight; he sees in Kitty the kinetic spark his comedies crave and flips the city’s signboard from despair to possibility. Backstage velvet soon swallows her, yet the limelight reveals another bruise: Vera Maxwell, a tragedienne nursing the ache of a love vacated by the rakish Oscar Savoy. Kitty, matchmaker and moonbeam, stitches their ruptured hearts while her own pulse flutters for Roger, Davis’s aloof nephew—an affection thwarted by pride, protocol, and the thousand invisible turnstiles of class. Finally, the puppeteer-playwright himself yanks the strings, aligning planets so that every yearning soul—inebriate aunt, lovelorn diva, diffident heir, and luminous émigré—spins into a synchronized waltz of closure, forgiveness, and curtain-call kisses.