The American Clock by Arthur Miller will be Shallowater High School’s entry for the one act play. It is a play that most Americans are unfamiliar with despite the infamous author, Arthur Miller. Subtitled "a mural for the theatre," the play employs a series of vignettes and short scenes, with the actors portraying some fifty-two characters, to capture the sense and substance of America in the throes of the Great Depression. The central figures are the Baums, a wealthy family whose fortune has vanished in the stock market crash, but their story is amplified and illuminated by brief glimpses of other lives; a farmer who has lost all in the dust bowl; a young man who dreams of success on Tin Pan Alley, etc. Moving deftly from scene to scene, some funny, some movingly poignant, the play becomes a deeply affecting evocation both of a tortured time in American history and of the indomitable spirit of the people who survived and prevailed in the face of unaccustomed adversity. The relevance of the 1930’s to today is one of the reasons I chose to do this play. The play dissects how the Great Depression affected different people from all walks of life. You see an older, married couple and what happens to them through the depression. You watch businessmen who think they’ve got everything and watch it all fall apart. In the end, it’s a play that’s about hope and perseverance. There are parallels between financiers like Andrew Mellon and today’s Bernie Madof. Although the play is not a musical, the jazzy genre of the 1930s plays a large role in the overall tone of the play. Our actors will be singing and playing songs of the era. My students will be researching and comparing and contrasting the two eras while creating the “world of the 1930’s.” Hopefully, this will be a learning experience as well as a successful production.