Two plays were adapted from The Winning of Barbara Worth not long after its publication in August, 1911, and both toured widely, meeting with mixed reviews.
Edwin Milton Royle (class of 1883 at Princeton), first studied law, then turned to acting and writing. For a time he toured with an itinerant Shakespeare company.
His play, The Squaw Man, about a cultivated Englishman and the American squaw whom he loved and wed, was played all over the world, ranking along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Abie’s Irish Rose, as enjoying one of the longest runs in stage history. It was made into a movie, generally listed as the first motion picture to be produced in Hollywood.

The Winning of Barbara Worth was one of the many books he dramatized for the stage. This was a three-act play which opened in Chicago with Edith Lyle as Barbara and Richard Gordon as Willard Holmes.

The Chicago Daily News reviewer Percy Hammond stated in his review in September, 1913, that Royle took “a respectable third-rater” and “went through it as Sherman through Georgia, leaving neither temple nor tower, but a chaos of ruins...”
Then there was another, apparently more popular, stage version of the book that was adapted by actor/playwright Mark Swan.

Swan was a prolific writer and actor. At the age of 17, he wrote and acted in a farce titled Blunders, which played for one night in his home town of Louisville, Kentucky. By 18 he was on the road with a Shakespearean company, and in 18 months with the company played twelve different roles. He went on to write some 300 motion pictures. He died in January 1942 at the age of 70.

His adaptation of The Winning of Barbara Worth was a diversion from his specialty of humor. The traveling production of Swan’s play arrived in California in March, 1915, playing in the Opera House in El Centro with a “splendid New York cast” and “full scenic equipment.” The publicity accompanying the play stated that “the company coming to El Centro is the same one that put the play on for 100 nights in Chicago, and since the Chicago season, has come directly west.

“The scenic effects are said to be most magnificent, the sandstorm in the prologue being realistic to a nicety.”

The cast was entertained in Imperial Valley, the site of the novel, by land developer William F. Holt, who was Wright’s model for the character Jefferson Worth. In an interview in his later years, Holt told a reporter he had gone to Chicago to see himself on the stage when the play was first produced. (Holt didn’t say which version of the play he saw in Chicago. Research in that city’s newspapers has as yet failed to find a record of the Swan play being staged there.)

The play moved on to San Diego, where it played at the Spreckels Theatre. Reviews were mixed, with the San Diego Union stating that “Thrills Fill Play At Spreckels Theatre,” where the “Colorado River on rampage was among many realistic scenes.” In contrast, the San Diego Tribune claimed that the play handicapped a good company. “Melodramatic style is not so bad, of course, if there is sufficient meat in it, but meat is not to be found with Harold Bell Wright,” their reviewer said.

With more than 85 years elapsed since Barbara Worth was first staged, one might think it had passed from the public interest. But following the location of copies of the two play-scripts in 1991-1992, the Imperial County Historical Society expressed interest in staging the Swan play. However the effort came to naught. Then, in 1997, a Los Angeles playwright wrote yet another version of the play, designed to be presented as a reading by a small group of players. This effort didn’t materialize either. Hopefully some day, somewhere, Barbara Worth will grace the stage once more, as captivatingly as she did in the early years of the century.

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