List of Grove Plays

[4] Finally, in 1902, both the music and the libretto were composed by club members, setting the "Bohemian grove-play as a distinct genre of stage art.

The Sire may select others to write the dialog and song lyrics, but remains responsible for the overall theme and final form of the spectacle.In the earliest productions of the Grove Play, several restrictions were imposed upon the Sire including that the stage setting be the natural forest backdrop and that the "malign character Care" be introduced in the plot, to wreak havoc with the characters and then be faced down and vanquished by the hero.

[7] The end of the ceremony was signaled by a lively Jinks Band rendition of There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,[8] and the club members sat down to a late dinner and revelry into the wee hours.

In response to member complaints about the unpredictable quality of the opening night fare, Charles K. Field was asked in 1923 to write the script for what became the basis for every subsequent Cremation of Care ceremony.

[12] Jack London wrote The Acorn Planter: A California Forest Play for the High Jinks but it was never staged; it was described as too difficult to set to music.

"[15] The Triumph of Bohemia was already planned, but the 1906 San Francisco earthquake changed the club's priorities in favor of a more elaborate cremation ceremony called The Owl and Care.

"[19] Journalist Philip Weiss, writing in 1989 for Spy magazine, said that the high point of the two-week summer encampment was the "vigorously lowbrow" Low Jinks, a musical comedy staged during the middle weekend, not the "mannered and ponderous Grove Play.

"[20] Journalism professor Richard Reinhardt argued in 1980 that the showy bombast of Broadway theatre producer David Belasco helped form in the early Grove Plays a taste for majestic and astounding visual effects, and that this aesthetic sense has continued to the present in a form of "institutional inertia.