Since 1937, audiences have ventured each summer to Manteo, N.C., to see Paul Green’s best-known outdoor drama, The Lost Colony. Yet, the book itself has been out of print since the mid-1960s.

Copyright disagreements have prevented drama enthusiasts from reading the play. Until now. Laurence Avery, professor of English who edited A Paul Green Reader in 1997, has published an updated version of the play.

Working with the Paul Green Foundation, which has controlled copyrights on the book since Green’s death in 1981, and the Roanoke Historical Society, which oversees the annual production of The Lost Colony, Avery brought the nation’s first historical outdoor drama back into print.

He’s added stage directions and an introduction. “I tried to create a version that is true to the spirit of Green’s play and current productions,” he says.

The drama’s text has been changed many times. Some directors, for instance, have downplayed the love story between the tenant farmer and the lady aristocrat. “In the text,” Avery says, “they expressed their feelings, saying things like ‘I love you.’ I have kept the full extent of Green’s dialogue.”

Avery says the play was originally intended to be a one-time production to celebrate the 350th anniversary of America’s earliest English colony, but it’s become important in that it “forged a new form of drama and inspired a movement in outdoor theater that is now nationwide.”