Twenty Best European Plays on the American Stage

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Excerpt from Twenty Best European Plays on the American Stage: Edited With an IntroductionExplanations do not alter the character of a book, but they may be useful in defining its limits. The present anthology is not an attempt to represent the modern European drama. Instead, it presents that drama as an element or factor in American professional stage production that my Crown anthologies of contemporary American plays have hitherto neglected.The neglect was intentional in my Best American Plays collections, which presented, and will continue to present, exclusively American playwriting. Readers of these compilations would have formed confused impressions of the qualities of American playwriting if European plays had been included for the sake of swelling my periodic chronicle of the American stage. It was long apparent, however, that the chronicle would be ¿agrantly incomplete unless it were supplemented by one or more volumes of European plays.The present volume is my first effort to enlarge the record of American stage production since World War I, and the character of the anthology may well explain why I postponed publishing it. The conventional compilations of plays from the time of Ibsen to the time of Sartre would not serve my purpose. These books and I compiled one of them, A Treasury (j the Theatre, myself are intended for the study of the European or the modern drama. The present anthology is intended primarily for the study of the American stage, as will any sequel to this volume that may appear later. I say study, because a comparison between the plays printed here and their original form will instruct the careful reader about Broadway's way of dealing with its imports. It may also dismay him at times, and that can be instructive, too. But it would be disingenuous for me to say that in preparing this anthology I hoped to instruct the general reader instead of merely interesting him. At most I wanted to show him another face of the American theatre, even if, in many instances, it may turn out to be the same face that some of us adore and others deplore. I could not have convinced my publishers to print so large a volume in so inflationary a period if I had been unable to offer a bounty to the public that takes its pleasure wherever it (can find it.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.