Cain

Roles

• Adah - Young Adult (20-35), Female

About this piece

Adah praises her son and scolds Cain for thinking about death

Summary

This play is a dramatization of the story of Cain and Abel. Cain, regarding his own mortality as an unfair punishment for Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden, refuses to worship God. As he refuses to participate in a family's prayer to God, he argues that he has nothing to thank God for as he is fated to die. Anxious to learn about death, Cain follows Lucifer into the Hades. Lucifer shows Cain a vision of the Earth's and human history and teaches him to accept his mortal nature and the "gift of reason" that God gave him which will bring him "nearer his spiritual nature". When Cain returns to earth though, he has not lost his negativity. In the first scene of act III, Cain is with his wife and sister, Adah, and their infant son Enoch who is sleeping. When Cain mentions that he even wished his child wasn't born so that he didn't have to endure all the pain and eventually death, Adah gets scared and, thinking that Cain might want to murder his own child, praises Enoch and scolds him for thinking negatively.

Tone

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