LOL (re the Continental Congress). You bring up some good points.
Anyway, looking at the published script, it really doesn't make sense. Although the lines you mention are not in the stage script, we have this:
Mrs. Paroo: I don't recall the liberry bein' open last Fourth a' July.
Marian: It was Mama—all evening.
Later in the scene when Winthrop enters, Mrs. Paroo says to him: "Winthrop, it's after dark."
So Marian comes home for dinner and to teach Amaryllis and then she goes to the gymnasium for the Fourth of July celebration and then she goes to re-open the library.
The script says that scene in the interior of the Madison Gymnasium starts 30 minutes after the end of the scene at the Paroo home. The gymnasium scene goes on a while. The next scene, on the street, is immediately following, and during the scene Marian enters the library, presumably to re-open it (unless there's an assistant librarian we don't otherwise hear about who's kept it open all this time). The next scene, in the library, is again immediately following. What time is it if it was already dark when Winthrop got home a good hour or more earlier? I must admit that I get terribly confused about how the lack of Daylight Savings Time affects all this.
I gotta say that MarjorieMae has certainly got us all thinking about this! The 2000 revival did make adjustments so that it wasn't all in one day, which was one of (I guess) a few ways it made adjustments that brought it closer to the film, or so I think people said at the time. I wasn't that aware of the differences. |
