The character-driven play covers three weeks time and has multiple storylines, including an ill-starred mail-order marriage, two refugees from an orphanage, the return of a long-lost husband, and a handful of young romances.

[4] After closing on Broadway in January 1905, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch went on an extensive tour, with additional companies performing in London and Australia.

Act I (Kitchen of Mrs. Wiggs' cottage, a large open area that doubles as living room and sleeping quarters.)

Miss Hazy asks Mrs. Wiggs to open the envelope for Stubbins, fearing another unpaid bill, but it contains a letter authorizing his Union Army pension and a check for $800 in arrears.

Ezra and Stubbins try to stop him, but the Deputy lays hold of Mary and is soundly beaten and driven off by the Cabbage Patch residents.

They had successfully produced stage adaptations of two novels by English authors, The Christian and Children of the Ghetto, and were on the lookout for another.

Tyler traveled to England hoping to secure some of J. M. Barrie's work, only to find he was tied up contractually by Charles Frohman.

[5] Barrie suggested Tyler consider works by William Allen White or Alice Hegan Rice.

[5] Alice Hegan Rice suggested to Liebler & Company that Anne Crawford Flexner do the stage adaptation.

[8] By the time the play started being performed, she had been inundated with visitors, helped by newspaper articles that printed her address.

He consulted an old playwright named George Hoey who suggested having Mrs. Wiggs place some pies in the train box car with Stubbins at the second act's end.

[2] After three days it went to Macauley's Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, where both Alice Hegan Rice and Anne Crawford Flexner were in attendance on opening night.

[15] But the same critic recognized the difficulty the playwright had in constructing a drama from the episodic sketches of the two books, and praised her choice of expanding the Hazy-Stubbins storyline to give a central plot to the production.

[19] Crosby thought the play "at best but a string of episodes" but "even this might have been covered up were the people in the cast competent to carry out the work assigned to them".

[19] He considered Helen Lowell's Miss Hazy as "terribly overdrawn" and William Hodge's Mr. Stubbins "overplayed", "grotesque", and "the greatest disappointment".

[1] The reviewer for the Chicago Tribune said that with the current cast Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was "humanly interesting" but with lesser performers would quickly fall to "character or rather, caricature melodrama".

[24] The Evening World reviewer called it "The Vegetable Play", dismissed the plot as unimportant and reported the audience was "intensely amused" with the "quaint and drolly" work.

[25] Brooklyn Life noted the play, while "thoroughly enjoyable", didn't ring as true as the original stories: "occasionally the characters run dangerously near the line of burlesque".

[26] The reviewer singled out Nora Shelby for opprobrium, calling her Miss Lucy "a libel on the original", presumably a reference to Beth Franklyn who had the role in the first season.

[28][29] The production then started touring again, beginning at New Rochelle, New York,[12] but without lead Mabel Taliaferro, who stayed in Manhattan for the role of Dolly in George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell.