La neboda : Comedia en tres actes en prosa

"Bacchus; or, wine to-day and to-morrow" by P. Morton Shand is a work written in the early 20th century. The text provided, however, is a Catalan three‑act stage comedy that satirizes class pretensions, gossip, and marriage schemes in a provincial house. It revolves around the status‑proud widow Donya Maria, the self‑possessed village doctor Don Tomás, and her determined son Mariano, with lively interference from servants like Nando, Tuyas, Miquel, Antonia, and the meddlesome Senyor Tayabas. The opening of the work sets us in a noble family’s old rural house in Catalonia, where servants banter over household accounts and cooking, Nando boasts extravagantly, and Senyor Tayabas’s tongue‑twisting chatter spills the reason for the visit: Donya Maria has fled the city to recover and to separate her son Mariano from a poor shopkeeper’s daughter. Comic plotting includes a plan to fake a successful hunt using tame rabbits to buoy Mariano’s spirits, while the village doctor, Don Tomás, arrives and exchanges warm memories with Donya Maria, hinting at an old bond turned late‑life courtship. At the start of the second act, the salon is being dressed up, a fruit gift arrives from Ramoneta (the doctor’s niece), Tayabas keeps meddling, and Mariano returns, confronts Tayabas about interference and the mysterious disappearance of his beloved, and Tomás and Maria privately weigh their affection against how family and neighbors might react. The excerpt ends with the pair anxious about revealing their intentions to kin who expect other futures. (This is an automatically generated summary.)