A Shaker Story The play takes place during the Shaker "awakening" of the 1830s and 1840s when there was a rich outpouring of songs and dance in connection with a spiritual upwelling. Some scenes in the play are loosely borrowed from events described by Hervey Elkins in Fifteen Years in the Senior Order of Shakers: A Narration of Facts, Concerning that Singular People published by Dartmouth Press, Hanover NH 1853. Herman Melville in Moby-Dick refers...