November 1917, all was not ready for the season. Renovations on the stage remained unfinished, the subscriptions for the season were not quite as substantial as initially reported, and housing for the actors was not available as projected and they were put up in hotels. On 26 November 1917, the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier de New York opened its season on the stage of the renovated Garrick Theatre with an Impromptu du Vieux-Colombier, a piece written especially for the occasion by Copeau, and Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin ("Scapin's Pranks"). In the center of the stage stood the bare platform Copeau had asked for in his Appel, which allowed the actors to wander about the stage until they were needed in a particular scene. The freedom of movement did not go unnoticed by the critics, as John Corbin of the New York Times remarked: "it renders possible many combinations and groupings, all sorts of telling encounters." During the first season, Vieux-Colombier in New York staged twenty-one different plays. Among them were ten plays from the first season in Paris but with a different casts since not all the original members of the troupe came to New York: Molière's La Jalousie du Barbouillé, L'Avare and L'Amour médecin, Musset's Barberine, the Copeau/Croué adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Nuit des rois, the adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night shared the stage with Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement ("The Carriage of the Holy Sacrament") of Prosper Mérimée, La Surprise de l'Amour (Love's Surprise) of Musset, and Poil de Carotte (Carrot Head) of Jules Renard. As during the first season, a mixture of both classic and modern plays, some by living authors, served as the basis of the repertoire. At the close of the New York season, Copeau took his troupe to Washington, D.C. and to the Little Theatre in Philadelphia where they presented ten different plays. In early May, they performed L'Avare at Vassar College to close their season. Certain offerings of the Vieux-Colombier received critical and popular acclaim. To no one's surprise The Brothers Karamazov, with Dullin, who finally arrived in New York in March 1918, in the role of Smerdiakov and later in his well-received role as Harpagon, the miser, counted among the successes. Nuit des rois also burnished the company's reputation. Some plays, such as Octave Mirbeau's Les Mauvais Bergers (The Evil Shepherds), ended with an almost empty house as the audience