Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors: Selected, With Biographical Notes This collection contains twenty-five 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 together 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 exploited 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. Because of this integrity, the one-act play is an art form, tending toward a perfect whole, and therein lies its contrast to the playlet of vaudeville and to the curtain raiser. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.