Washington Square Plays

								

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,