their contes either in collections or in the pages of the magazines. What similar chances are there, or can there be, for the one-act play, the dramatic short story?

An obvious chance is offered by vaudeville. The vaudeville audience is in the mood for rapid alterations of attention; it has the habit of variety. This is just as much a convention of vaudeville as the single play is now a convention of the traditional theatre. Indeed, anything longer than a one-act play in vaudeville would be frowned upon. Any one wishing to push the analogy can find more than one correspondence between a vaudeville program and the contents of a "popular" magazine; each, certainly, is the present refuge of short fiction. Yet vaudeville can hardly be considered an ideal cradle for a serious dramatic art. (Shall we say that the analogy to the "popular" magazine still holds?) The average "playlet"—atrocious word—in the variety theatres is a dreadful thing, crude, obvious, often sensational or sentimental, usually very badly acted at least in the minor recircles, and still more a frank padding, a thing of the footlights, than the afterpiece of our parents. It has been frequently said by those optimists who are forever discovering the birth of the arts in popular amusements that vaudeville audiences will appreciate and applaud the best. This is only in part true. They will appreciate the best juggler, the cleverest trained dog, the most appealing ballad singer such as Chevalier or Harry Lauder. But they will no more appreciate those subtleties of dramatic art which must have free play in the serious development of the one-act play than the readers of a "popular" magazine in America (or England either) would appreciate Kipling's "They," or George Moore's "The Wild Goose," or de Maupassant's "La Ficelle." To expect them to is silly; and to expect that because the supreme, vivid example of any form is comprehensible to all classes and all mixtures of classes, therefore the supreme example is going to be developed out of the commonplace stuff such mixed audiences daily enjoy, is equally to misunderstand the evolution of an art product in our complex modern world. But, indeed, the matter scarce calls for argument. Vaudeville itself furnishes the answer. Where are its one-act plays which can be called dramatic literature? It is a hopeful sign, perhaps, that certain of the plays in this volume have percolated into the varieties! But they were not cradled there.

If the traditional theatre, then, is now in a rut which affords no room 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, an intellectual "skit," which would equally suffer by prolongation. "Eugenically Speaking" could certainly bear no further extension, unless its mood were deepened into seriousness. Finally, "The Clod" approaches the true episodic roundness of the one-act drama, or the short story, in its best estate. Here is a single episode of reality, taken from its context and set apart for contemplation. It begins at the proper moment for understanding, it ends when the tale is told. There is here more than a hint of the art of Guy de Maupassant. And the episode is theatrically exciting—a prime requisite for practical performance, and spiritually significant—a prime requisite for the serious consideration of intelligent spectators. In these four plays, then, written for the Washington Square Players, the one-act form demonstrates its right to our attention and cultivation, for it takes interesting ideas or situations which are incapable of expansion into longer dramas and makes intelligent entertainment of what otherwise would be lost.

Because such organizations as the Abbey Theatre have demonstrated the value of the one-act play in portraying local life, in stimulating a local stage literature; because such organizations in America as the Washington Square Players have demonstrated the superior value of the one-act play as a weapon with which to win recognition and build up the histrionic capacity to tackle longer works; and, finally, because the one-act play offers such obvious advantages to amateurs, it seems fairly certain that in the immediate future, at least, the one-act play in America, as a serious art form, will be cultivated by the experimental theatres, the so-called "Little Theatres," and by the more ambitious and talented amateurs. As our experimental theatres increase in number—and they are increasing—it will probably play its part, and perhaps no insignificant a part, in the development of a national drama through the development of a local drama and the cultivation of a taste for self-expression in various communities. It is only when these experimental theatres are sufficient in number, and the amateur spirit has been sufficiently aroused in various communities, that the commercial theatre of tradition will be seriously influenced. When that time comes—if it does come—one of the results will undoubtedly be a more flexible theatre, the growth of repertoire companies, the expansion of the activities of popular players. In a more flexible theatre, where repertoire is a rule rather than a strange and dreaded experiment, and where actors pride themselves on versatility and the public honors them for it, the one-act play