Meanwhile the company which was to play was preparing the stage, and Capa was setting up his lights to photograph the play. It seemed to us that the girls were a little impatient when the music stopped. They did not want to stop dancing for the play.

It was a little propaganda play, and it was naïve and charming. The story was as follows: There is a girl on a farm, but she is a lazy girl, and she does not want to work. She wants to go to a town, and paint her nails, and use lipstick, and be decadent and degraded. As the play opens, she is engaged in an argument with a good girl, a girl who is a brigade-leader, a girl who is honored for her great work in the fields. The girl who wants to paint her nails slouches around the stage and is obviously no good, whereas the other, the brigade-leader, stands very straight, with her hands at her sides, and declaims her lines. The third member of the cast is a heroic tractor-driver, and the interesting thing is that he really is a tractor-driver, and the play had been held up an hour and a half while he fixed the tractor he had been working with all day. The heroic tractor-driver had one dramatic trick, and only one—he delivered his lines pacing back and forth across the stage, smoking cigarettes.

Now the tractor-driver is in love with the girl who wants to paint her nails. He is really in love with her, and he is in grave danger of losing his soul to her. In fact, as the play progresses, it is obvious that he is almost ready to throw up his job driving a tractor and helping the economy of the people, to move into a city and get an apartment and live softly with the nail-painting girl. But the brigade-leader, standing very straight, delivers a lecture to him.

It does no good. He is obviously distraught, and he is very much in love with the slovenly, no-good girl. He does not know what to do. Shall he give up the girl he loves, or shall he follow her to town and become a bum?

Now the decadent girl goes off stage, leaving the brigade-leader with the tractor-driver. And the brigade-leader, with feminine wile, tells the tractor-driver that this girl does not really love him. She only wants to marry him because he is such an eminent tractor-driver, and she would soon be sick of him. The tractor-driver does not believe this, and so the brigade-leader says with a flash of inspiration, “I have it. You pretend to make love to me, and when she sees us you will find how much she loves you.”

This new idea is accepted. The nail-painter makes an entrance to find the tractor-driver holding the brigade-leader in his arms, and, lo and behold, not what you would expect happens, for the slovenly girl decides that she will become a worker in socialist economy. She will stay on the farm. She turns her fury on the brigade-leader. She says, “I will form my own brigade, not only you can be so eminent and decorated. I myself will become a brigade-leader and wear decorations.”