The rigid conventionality of the theatre has been frequently remarked
upon. Why the world should ever fear a radical, indeed, is hard to see,
since he has against him the whole dead weight of society; but least of
all need the radical be dreaded in the theatre. When the average person
pays money for his amusements, he is little inclined to be pleased with
something which doesn't amuse him: and what amuses him, nine times out
of ten, is what has amused him. That is why changes in the theatre are
relatively slow, and customs long prevail, even till it seems they may
corrupt the theatrical world.
For many generations in our playhouse it was the custom to follow the
long play of the evening with an "afterpiece," generally in one act, but
always brief, and almost always gay, if not farcical. Audiences, which
in the early days assembled before seven o'clock, had to be sent home
happy. After the tragedy, the slap-stick or the loud guffaw; after
"Romeo and Juliet," Cibber's "Hob in the Well"; after "King Lear," "The
Irish Widow." (These two illustrations are taken at random from the
programs of the Charleston theatre in 1773.) This custom persisted
until comparatively recent times. The fathers and mothers of the present
generation can remember when William Warren, at the Boston Museum, would
turn of an evening from such a part as his deep-hearted Sir Peter Teazle
to the loud and empty vociferations of a Morton farce. The entertainment
in those days would hardly have been considered complete without the
"afterpiece," or, as time went on, sometimes the "curtain raiser." It is
by no means certain that theatre seats were always cheaper than to-day.
In some cases, certainly, they were relatively quite as high. But it
is certain that you got more for your money. You frequently saw your
favorite actor in two contrasted roles, two contrasted styles of acting
perhaps, and you saw him from early evening till a decently late hour.
You didn't get to the theatre at 8.30, wait for the curtain to rise on a
thin-spun drawing-room comedy at 8.45, and begin hunting for your wraps
at 10.35. One hates to think, in fact, what would have happened to a
manager fifty years ago who didn't give more than that for the price
of a ticket. Our fathers and mothers watched their pennies more sharply
than we do.
For various reasons, one of them no doubt being the growth of cheaper
forms of amusement and the consequent desertion from the traditional
playhouse of a considerable body of those who least like, and can least
afford, to spend money irrespective of returns, the "afterpiece" and
"curtain raiser" have practically vanished from our stage. They have so
completely vanished, in fact, that theatre goers have lost not only the
habit of expecting them, but the imaginative flexibility to enjoy them.
If you should play "Romeo and Juliet" to-day and then follow it with
a one-act farce, your audience would be uncomfortably bewildered. They
would be unable to make the necessary adjustment of mood. If you focus
your vision rapidly from a near to a far object, you probably suffer
from eye-strain. Similarly, the jump from one play to the other in the
theatre gives a modern audience mind- or mood-strain. It is largely
a matter of habit. We, to-day, have lost the trick through lack of
practice. The old custom is dead; we are fixed in a new one. If Maude
Adams, for instance, should follow "The Little Minister" with a roaring
farce, or Sothern should turn on the same evening from "If I Were King"
to "Box and Cox," we should feel that some artistic unity had been
rudely violated; nor am I at all sure, being a product of this
generation, but that we should be quite right.
Matters standing as they do, then, it seems to me that the talk
we frequently hear about reviving "the art of the one-act play" by
restoring the curtain raisers or afterpieces to the programs of our
theatres is reactionary and futile. All recent attempts to pad out
a slim play with an additional short one have failed to meet with
approval, even when the short piece was so masterly a work as Barrie's
"The Will," splendidly acted by John Drew, or the same author's "Twelve
Pound Look," acted by Miss Barrymore. Nor is it at all certain that the
one-act plays of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents,
the names of which you may read by the thousands on ancient playbills,
added anything to the store of dramatic literature. Some of them are
decently entombed in the catacombs of Lacy's British Drama, or still
available for amateurs in French's library. Did you ever try to read
one? Of course, there was "Box and Cox," but it is doubtful if there
will be any great celebration at the tercentenary of Morton's death.
For the most part, those ancient afterpieces were frankly padding,
conventional farces to fill up the bill and send the audiences home
happy. To the real art of the drama or the development of the one-act
play as a form of serious literary expression, they made precious little
contribution. They were a theatrical tradition, a convention.
But the one-act play, nonetheless, has an obvious right to existence, as
much as the short story, and there are plentiful proofs that it can be
as terse, vivid, and significant. Most novelists don't tack on a short
story at the end of their books for full measure, but issue their contes
either in collections or in the pages of the magazines. What similar
chances are there, or can there be, for the one-act play, the dramatic
short story?
An obvious chance is offered by vaudeville. The vaudeville audience
is in the mood for rapid alterations of attention; it has the habit of
variety. This is just as much a convention of vaudeville as the single
play is now a convention of the traditional theatre. Indeed, anything
longer than a one-act play in vaudeville would be frowned upon. Any
one wishing to push the analogy can find more than one correspondence
between a vaudeville program and the contents of a "popular" magazine;
each, certainly, is the present refuge of short fiction. Yet vaudeville
can hardly be considered an ideal cradle for a serious dramatic art.
(Shall we say that the analogy to the "popular" magazine still holds?)
The average "playlet"--atrocious word--in the variety theatres is
a dreadful thing, crude, obvious, often sensational or sentimental,
usually very badly acted at least in the minor recircles, and still
more a frank padding, a thing of the footlights, than the afterpiece
of our parents. It has been frequently said by those optimists who are
forever discovering the birth of the arts in popular amusements that
vaudeville audiences will appreciate and applaud the best. This is
only in part true. They will appreciate the best juggler, the cleverest
trained dog, the most appealing ballad singer such as Chevalier or Harry
Lauder. But they will no more appreciate those subtleties of dramatic
art which must have free play in the serious development of the one-act
play than the readers of a "popular" magazine in America (or England
either) would appreciate Kipling's "They," or George Moore's "The Wild
Goose," or de Maupassant's "La Ficelle." To expect them to is silly;
and to expect that because the supreme, vivid example of any form is
comprehensible to all classes and all mixtures of classes, therefore the
supreme example is going to be developed out of the commonplace stuff
such mixed audiences daily enjoy, is equally to misunderstand the
evolution of an art product in our complex modern world. But, indeed,
the matter scarce calls for argument. Vaudeville itself furnishes
the answer. Where are its one-act plays which can be called dramatic
literature? It is a hopeful sign, perhaps, that certain of the plays
in this volume have percolated into the varieties! But they were not
cradled there.
If the traditional theatre, then, is now in a rut which affords no room
for the one-act play, and if vaudeville is an empty cradle for this
branch of dramatic art, where shall we turn? The one-act play to-day has
found refuge and encouragement in the experimental theatres, and among
the amateurs. The best one-act plays so far written in English have come
out of Ireland, chiefly from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin where they were
first acted by a company recruited from amateur players. Synge's "Riders
to the Sea," Yeats's "The Hour Glass," the comedies of Lady Gregory and
others of that school, have not only proved the power of this form
to carry the sense of reality, but its power as well to reach tragic
intensity or high poetic beauty. The sombre loveliness and cleansing
reality of Synge's masterpiece are almost unrivaled in our short-play
literature. Not from the Abbey Theatre, but from the pen of an Irishman,
Lord Dunsany, have come such short fantasies as "The Gods of the
Mountain" and "The Glittering Gate," which the so-called "commercial"
theatre has quite ignored, but which have been played extensively by
amateurs and experimental theatres throughout America; and the latter
piece, especially, has probably been provocative of more experimental
stagecraft and a greater stimulation of poetic fancy among amateur
producers than any drama, short or long, written in recent years.
When the Washington Square Players, for the most part amateurs of the
theatre, began their experiment in the spring of 1915, they began with
a bill of one-act plays. With but two exceptions, all their succeeding
productions have been composed of one-act plays, usually in groups of
four, the last one for the evening sometimes being a pantomime. (It
should be noted that a program of four one-act plays has the unity of
a collection. A short play following a long one is overbalanced and the
program seems to most of us awry.) The reason for this choice was not
entirely a devotion to the art of the one-act play. When players are
inexperienced, it is far easier to present a group of plays of one act
than it is to sustain a single set of characters for an entire evening.
The action moves more rapidly, the tale is told before the monotony of
the actors becomes too apparent. Moreover, the difference between the
plays helps to furnish that variety which the players themselves cannot
supply by their impersonations. Still again, it was no doubt easier for
the Washington Square Players to find novelties within their capacity
in the one-act form than in the longer medium. At any rate, they did
produce one-act plays, and are still producing them.
Four of these plays are presented in this book, four which won approval
first on the stage of the Bandbox Theatre and later, acted by other
players, in various other theatres. One of them, "Overtones," is a
theatrical novelty which if prolonged beyond the one-act form would
become monotonous. Another, "Helena's Husband," is a bantering satire,
an intellectual "skit," which would equally suffer by prolongation.
"Eugenically Speaking" could certainly bear no further extension, unless
its mood were deepened into seriousness. Finally, "The Clod" approaches
the true episodic roundness of the one-act drama, or the short story,
in its best estate. Here is a single episode of reality, taken from its
context and set apart for contemplation. It begins at the proper moment
for understanding, it ends when the tale is told. There is here
more than a hint of the art of Guy de Maupassant. And the episode is
theatrically exciting--a prime requisite for practical performance, and
spiritually significant--a prime requisite for the serious consideration
of intelligent spectators. In these four plays, then, written for the
Washington Square Players, the one-act form demonstrates its right
to our attention and cultivation, for it takes interesting ideas or
situations which are incapable of expansion into longer dramas and makes
intelligent entertainment of what otherwise would be lost.
Because such organizations as the Abbey Theatre have demonstrated the
value of the one-act play in portraying local life, in stimulating a
local stage literature; because such organizations in America as the
Washington Square Players have demonstrated the superior value of the
one-act play as a weapon with which to win recognition and build up the
histrionic capacity to tackle longer works; and, finally, because the
one-act play offers such obvious advantages to amateurs, it seems fairly
certain that in the immediate future, at least, the one-act play in
America, as a serious art form, will be cultivated by the experimental
theatres, the so-called "Little Theatres," and by the more ambitious and
talented amateurs. As our experimental theatres increase in number--and
they are increasing--it will probably play its part, and perhaps no
insignificant a part, in the development of a national drama through
the development of a local drama and the cultivation of a taste
for self-expression in various communities. It is only when these
experimental theatres are sufficient in number, and the amateur
spirit has been sufficiently aroused in various communities, that the
commercial theatre of tradition will be seriously influenced. When that
time comes--if it does come--one of the results will undoubtedly be a
more flexible theatre, the growth of repertoire companies, the expansion
of the activities of popular players. In a more flexible theatre, where
repertoire is a rule rather than a strange and dreaded experiment, and
where actors pride themselves on versatility and the public honors them
for it, the one-act play will again have its place, but not then as a
curtain raiser or afterpiece, to pad out an evening or "send the suburbs
home happy," but as a serious branch of dramatic art. In that happy
day Barrie will not be the only first-class talent in the commercial
playhouse daring the one-act form, or at least able to induce a
commercial manager to produce his work in that form.
But that time is not yet. The one-act play in our country to-day is an
ally of the amateurs and the innovators. For that very reason,
perhaps, it is the form which will bear the most watching for signs of
imagination and for flashes of insight and interpretative significance.
WALTER PRICHARD EATON. Stockbridge, Massachusetts.