The story concerns an orphan girl whose cheerful demeanor is infectious, unlocking long frozen hearts.

It ran three months on Broadway and continued touring until the 1920 silent film with Mary Pickford put an end to the play's commercial viability.

Though successful, the play was never revived on Broadway, nor was it adapted to other media, the subsequent Pollyanna films in 1920 and 1960 having gone back to the book for their screenplays.

Lead Supporting Featured Bit player Quadruped Off stage Act I (Miss Polly Harrington's parlor, a summer afternoon.)

[fn 3] They are aghast at Nancy's free tongue and astonished at Miss Polly's news about her niece coming to live with her.

Pollyanna then brings in her own gift for Miss Polly, a basket with a tiny kitten and puppy, who she introduces as Sodom and Gomorrah.

Later, Pollyanna sneaks back into the library through a window, bringing the basket with Sodom and Gomorrah, who Pendleton reluctantly agrees to keep.

Bleecker and Pendleton are fixing up the library to celebrate Pollyanna's return from Europe, where she has been treated by medical specialists.

Jimmy Bean, now James Pendleton, returns from a horseback ride to describe the throng waiting at the train station.

When Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna proved popular, Tyler secured the stage rights to it for Liebler & Company, and commissioned Catherine Chisholm Cushing to do the dramatic treatment.

[4] However, a cash crisis brought on by the rise of motion pictures and the start of World War I[5] forced Liebler & Company into receivership during December 1914.

[6] Though ousted from control, Tyler was able to steer Liebler's ownership of the stage rights for Pollyanna to his sometime associate, Abe Erlanger.

Klaw and Erlanger would supply the initial financing for Pollyanna,[fn 5] with Tyler handling the actual production role.

At age 22, she was quite diminutive; so short in fact that at one theater that lacked stairs she couldn't scramble onto the stage from the audience area like the other performers, and so had to be lifted up by director Frederick Stanhope.

[10] Effie Shannon and Herbert Kelcey were signed next,[11] with casting complete by early August and rehearsals starting in Detroit's Opera House.

[12] A journalist who witnessed a last dress rehearsal reported that Patricia Collinge "swept through every scene with ease and grace", until "she had to climb a steep flight of shaky stairs".

Local critic George P. Goodale wrote a review that bordered on hagiography: cast, production, and writing were all perfect and greatly enjoyed by the audience.

Percy Hammond of the Chicago Tribune was more circumspect, recognizing the play's popularity but avoiding judgement on its dramatic value.

He suggested that in spirit and appeal it resembled Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, The Man from Home, and Daddy Longlegs.

[24] The reception by Broadway critics was muted; few newspapers bothered to review a work that had been first performed a year earlier.

"[24] The critic for the New-York Tribune implied that the play was 95% sugar, and said "It was a success last night at the end of the second act", and complimented Patricia Collinge for doing "as much as any actress could have done to make the character plausible".

[25] The New York Times reviewer declined to offer any suggestions for improving Pollyanna: "Criticism of such a play would be futile because it achieves its purpose-- it makes a great many people glad....

The fact that it is a crudely constructed play, that all of its situations are hackneyed, that it often mixes pathos with bathos and that some will depart determined never to be pleasant again, does not matter.