Word: witched
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Half fey, half folksy, the play is based on the Southern mountaineer (not the Old English) ballad of Barbara Allen. For love of high-stepping young Barbara (Carol Stone), a witch boy in the Great Smokies (Richard Hart) has a Conjur Woman make him human. But he can remain so, the old crone tells him, only if Barbara stays faithful to him for a year after their marriage. On the last night of the year, the community,* at last awake to the boy's origin, compels Barbara to sin. (A rape scene that the censors knocked...
There are some nice things in Dark of the Moon. With its folk songs and dances, its revival meetings and darting witch girls, it is freaked with color, touched with strangeness. But all this adds brightness rather than body to a yarn that is never very robust, and that takes hours to re-count what the ballad tells in a moment. Nor is there much more real poetry to Dark of the Moon than there is real drama. Its folkways make pleasant enough rustic vaudeville, but they smell of Broadway. Its witches' world escapes absurdity, but falls far short...
Down in the Great Smoky country of Tennessee, the mountain folk tell tall tales about black nights when witch boys mount the bald eagle's back to glide over jutting stone peaks. "Dark of the Moon" captures the God-fearing earthiness of the hill people, and puts a thoroughly American legend on the stage with poetic artistry, pungent humor, and lusty music straight from the core of native balladry...
There is fantasy, sweeping and bleak, on the top of Baldy Mountain when John the Witch Boy crawls up from his Stygian haunts to search for his mountain lass; tangy amusement at the cracker barrel and at the revival meeting. There is rollicking music from the deep throats of the mountaineers in church, singing "Lonesome Valley" to save a boy and girl who "pleasured themselves" indiscreetly; and there is delicate ballet in an aura of the supernatural when Lista, the Dark Witch, and Croma, the Fair Witch, jealous of Barbara Allen--"we ain't got nothin' again her, only...
...other down with his horse, though Catana was only a tavern keeper's daughter. And without quite knowing what he was doing, he delivered himself and his family into the power of the Inquisition by trying to help a soldier whose mother had been arrested as a witch...