Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WHY THE ONE-ACT PLAY? For all who are really interested to produce worth-while material the place and importance of the above named form of dramatic literature cannot be overlooked nor underestimated. The rise and activity of the Little Theaters has made possible the use of more material in one-act form than has been before feasible. One- act plays of a poorer sort have been used for a long time by clubs desiring the most trivial sort of entertainment, and as an act on the vaudeville stage, or as a curtain raiser. By far the greater part of all this material has been of an impossible sort, with no theme worth the naming, and less structure. The material now available is of an entirely different sort and worthy to be classed as literature. Much of it indeed is from the pen of some of the ablest of writers of literature indramatic and other forms. Witness such names as Barrie, Shaw, Lady Gregory, Dunsany, Yeats, Synge, Chapin, Brighouse, Hausman, and many others abroad, while the names of Percy Mackaye, Susan Glaspell, Howard Brock, Ridgley Tor- rence, Alice Gerstenberg, Eugene O'Neill and Hartley Manners are only a few of the writers who have produced valuable literature in this form in this country. College and University groups have been quick to see the advantages in the use of this form of the drama and much good has been accomplished by their presentation of one-act plays. This writing and presentation has been encouraged largely, as I said, by the wider use of the form in this country, and more particularly, perhaps, by the use of the one-act play in the best theaters of Europe. Mr. Lewis, Associate Professor of English in the University of Utah, author of The Technique of the One-Act Play, has the following to say in a recent bulletin sent out by th...
Synopsis
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