Washington Square Plays

								

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.

PREFACE TO THE PLAYS
If fools did not rush in where theatrical angels fear to tread, this
Preface would never have been written. Two years back the Washington
Square Players were called, by many who had theatrical experience,
fools. Now some term us pioneers. The future may write us fools again,
or something better--the conclusion being that the difference between
the fool and the pioneer lies in the outcome; the secret, that the
motive power behind both is enthusiasm.
Without enthusiasm the Washington Square Players could never have come
into existence, nor survived. From the first, when we had barely enough
money for rent and none for the costumes and properties we borrowed and
disguised, ours was an enthusiasm strong in quantity as well as quality.
The theatre is a peculiar art. Both in production and reception it
requires numbers and an enduring faith. Many a similar attempt has
failed because its experimentation and expression have been restricted
by a single point of view. Many have not continued because the desire
has waned in the face of the hardships and sacrifices entailed. But the
Players rightly had a plural name. We were, and are, a collection of
many individuals--actors, authors, artists, and art-lovers--all fired
with the sincere desire to give to playgoers something they had not been
able previously to find on the American stage. And our desire has been
strong enough to face and fight, and to continue to face and fight,
the ever-growing, ever-changing problems of finance, art, and human
inter-relations, which are the inescapable factors of the theatre.
We believed in the democracy of the drama. But we understand democracy
to mean, not the gratification of the taste of the many to the exclusion
of that of the few, but the satisfaction of all tastes. We had no
quarrel with the stage as it was, save that there wasn't enough of it.
We felt there was a public that wanted something other than it could
get--as evidenced by the rise of such institutions as the Drama
League--and that that public was large enough to support what it wanted
once it learned where to find it. The problem was to bridge the gap of
waiting. And it was met by the sacrifices of all those who worked at
first for nothing, and then for little more, so that the Players would
not fall into debt in the process of reaching an audience. As an able
New York dramatic critic stated, the establishment of the Washington
Square Players was merely one more proof that in America, as elsewhere,