REPRESENTATIVE ONE-ACT PLAYS BY AMERICAN AUTHORS DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER PREFACE THIS collection contains twenty-four of the most significant one-act plays of the Little Theatre movement in America. Some of them have not been previously printed others have been out of print for some time or are inaccessible. I have made the collection in the hope that by bringing them to gether in one volume they will not be immediately lost. Although the war has for a moment scattered many of the Little Theatres and stunted the growth of the new play form, it is because the art is now at a pause that it may be more easily surveyed. While there are many who believe that one-act plays are more or less frivolous and ought to be enjoyed rather than analyzed, I have taken the liberty, in this collection, of being serious. Too often the frothy one-act play has been ex ploited and the sincere effort overlooked, but it is indeed true that beneath the movement as a whole there exists a purpose worthy of serious consideration. During the last few years, both here and abroad, there has been discussion of the one-act play which has been feeling toward the establishment of the one-act form as a new and distinct type. The few who have written about it are agreed that the one-act play is properly analogous to the short-story, that it is quite as rigid a form, and that it is as different a type from the longer play as the short-story is from the novel. It cannot, if a good one-act play, be either expanded into three acts or condensed from the longer play without a loss. Be cause of this integrity, the one-act play is an art form, tend ing toward a perfect whole, and therein lies its contrast to the playlet ofvaudeville and to the curtain raiser. The vii viii PREFACE play is not the familiar vaudeville sketch upon this point the vaudeville managers are quite as insistent as are the managers of the Little Theatres. The vaudeville managers have been extremely wary of the intrusion of the new type. In return, the managers of the Little Theatres have had small desire to produce the vaudeville playlets. But to understand the new play one must know something of the theatres which have cultivated it the so-called Little Theatres To the uninitiated the term is vague, and even those who are acquainted with it use it more or less loosely. Speaking generally, the Little Theatre may be said to be an organization of earnest workers interested more in the future of the drama than in their own pecuniary gains. The size of the theatre is of no vital consideration, although it happens that the type of drama which is now prevalent can be most successfully presented in a small playhouse. Specifically, the Little Theatres are those small playhouses which are dotting the land from coast to coast, termed variously amateur, social, community, but more often Little, and in which some local company produces at regular inter vals and with a sincere purpose its repertory of plays. There are the private clubs, such as the Plays and Players of Philadelphia private theatres, such as the Bramhall Play house of New York high school organizations, such as Our Little Theatre of South Bend, Indiana college workshops, as at Harvard theatre societies without a box office, such as the Provincetown Players theatre workshops, such as the New York organization of that name Little Theatres nominally and little theatres in size.Since the first venture of 1906 there have arisen some eighty of them. 1 More often than not these companies produce the one-act play, both because it is more easily sustained than a longer play of corresponding aim, and because it is an experiment on a smaller scale…
