A team of down-and-out theatrical producers decides to stage a production of the Victorian melodrama The Drunkard in a music hall and force their idle relatives to perform the play. The play's program encourages the beer-drinking audience to "hiss the villain" and "applaud the hero," and throughout the performance, the audience yells epithets at the players. The play's story concerns the widow Wilson and her daughter Mary, who are told by the villain, Squire Cribbs, that their cottage will have to be sold because the landowner, Edward Middleton, is a dissolute man who is "reckless, wild and giddy" and will have no pity on them. The widow tells Mary to visit Edward with their last thirty dollars, which was earmarked for fuel, and pay the rent. Meanwhile, Cribbs, a lawyer whom Edward believes was a friend of his father, tells Edward to acquire the Wilson cottage and its adjacent lands, thereby securing free access to the attractive Mary. The kindhearted Edward is aghast at Cribbs' insinuation that he would take advantage of Mary and, instead, falls in love with her and tells her to keep her money as a portion of her dowry and marry him. Cribbs then tries to pay Edward's foster brother William for an invitation to the wedding, but William refuses his bribe. Cribbs then addresses the audience and announces that William's half-witted sister Agnes knows too much. Agnes went crazy after Cribbs ruined her fiancé, who died in a drunken fit. When Cribbs tries to whip Agnes, William enters and saves her. Edward and Mary are wed, and years later, Edward has become a drunkard. When he is knocked out in a barroom brawl, he wakes and has a somber realization of what he has become. He then returns home, again drunk, to find the widow Wilson dying. After she dies, Edward abandons Mary and their little girl Julia in their sorrow, shouting, "curse me as your destroyer." Later, Mary gets work as a seamstress in New York, where she has gone seeking Edward, and she and Julia are cold and starving. Cribbs enters and lunges at Mary, but William saves her and Cribbs shouts that he will be revenged. Edward, meanwhile, wakes up in a barn and, in a fit of delirium tremens, sees snakes. He is about to take an overdose of powder when a reformer named Artie Renslow enters to rescue him from the "abyss into which he has fallen." Gates, a Middleton villager, then tells farmer Stevens, with whom Edward had the brawl, that he was told that Cribbs committed heavy forgery on the firm of Winslow and Company. In the meantime, Agnes is cured and she tries to find William to tell him Cribbs's secret, while William is determined to catch Cribbs and reunite Edward and Mary. Agnes then tells William that she found a mound of dirt beneath a tree and, digging, found the will of Edward's grandfather, which left all to Edward's father. The will under which Cribbs acted was a forgery. To catch Cribbs, Artie has him incriminate himself by digging for the will beneath the tree. When he shouts that the deed he buried is gone, the sheriff arrests him. The Middleton estate is restored to Edward and Mary, and Edward returns to his wife and child, sober. Edward then thanks Artie for his help and recites the poem: "There came a change/The cloud rolled off/A light fell on my brain/And like the passing of a dream that cometh not again/The blackness of my spirit fled/I saw the gulf before/And shuddered at the waste behind/And am a man once more." At the urging of the audience, Mary and Edward kiss.
