The story concerns the dismissal of a young servant when she becomes pregnant by her employer's son, and her subsequent fight for justice.

Lead Supporting Featured Bit Players Voice only The play as first presented had both a prologue and an epilogue, each set ten years in the future of the main action.

She tells him the beginning of a true story that occurred ten years before to Ellen Neal, as a lead-in to the play's three acts.

Christmas, 1904) Ellen, while serving guests at the Fullerton's holiday dance, encounters Arthur Coakley, the man who seduced her last year.

But under oath, Mrs. Neal reveals Ellen is not her daughter, but that of a woman named Dolly Montrose and some big man in the city.

Ellen, upon hearing that her real mother chose not to impede the career of her father, asks the court to drop the charges against Coakley.

After they are alone in the court room, Filson shows Ellen the farewell note Dolly Montrose wrote him before her suicide.

Hugh proposes marriage, and his father Richard, not knowing her as Ellen, welcomes the famous singer with pride to their honorable family.

(Curtain) Cleves Kinkead was an attorney from Louisville, Kentucky, a supporter of female suffrage,[4][5] who donated his time to the local Legal Aid Society.

[6] He was already thirty-one and a former Kentucky state legislator[7] when he took a course as a postgraduate at Harvard University, Professor Baker's English 47 Playwriting Workshop.

[10] When Kinkead won, The Harvard Crimson expressed disapproval, for he lacked the status required in the prize guidelines, having graduated from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

[11] Kinkead's experience working as a police court reporter in Louisville, and his knowledge of legal procedure, were employed in writing Common Clay.

They felt the exposure of the Fullerton's faults overdone, and found the character of Coakley wearisome, but the acting and production were very well done.

[14] The Boston Globe reviewer was convinced of the plays future: "It has in it the elements of a Broadway success; more than that it has a message and a meaning...".

[17] Common Clay was presented at Nixon's Apollo Theatre[fn 1] in Atlantic City, New Jersey on August 2, 1915.

[18] Louis W. Cline wrote that the opening night was marred by rain and a leaky roof, disconcerting John Mason who already had some trouble with his lines.

He attributed the play's appreciative recepetion by the audience to the acting of John Mason and Jane Cowl, with additional honors to Dudley Hawley and Robert McWade.

[22] Two days before the play opened on Broadway, the New-York Tribune reported that it was in the form of three acts and an epilogue.

He found the repeated sobbings of characters in the courtroom scene annoying, saying "The sins of the fathers were visited upon the audience in the third act".

He credited author Kinkead with sincerity, but judged his writing ineffective, while "Jane Cowl is an actress wholly lacking in subtlety".

[26] Despite mixed reviews, the play proved a popular success, occupying the Republic from opening to closing of that theatre's season.