As the cost of the theater mounts up—the price of seats, the price of achieving Broadway productions—the Fireside Theater audience is steadily recruited. If there has existed a prejudice against reading plays, it is melting. The mere force of conditions would tend to destroy such a prejudice. The path to Broadway becomes steadily more difficult and the path away from Broadway narrower—all because it costs too much to produce a play on Broadway, and far too much to take the play, once so produced, on the road. Soon the Broadway theater will survive as the horse survives; and Broadway productions, inspired by the same motives as the production of horse races, will be nobly upheld by the same justificatory excuse—it will be argued that they improve the breed of plays.
It does no harm to have a few horse shows or to have a few Broadway productions; but the truth must be stated that the theater in America no longer depends upon the amusement business in the vicinity of Forty-second Street. To an extent never before equaled, plays are now published in America regardless of their production; are bought and read; are read aloud for an exceptional evening’s entertainment; and are acted under license, and with payment of very moderate fees, by people to whom a play is a play and not a pair of high-priced tickets.
For amateur actors, many of them amazingly capable, there are now available plays of every length and of every conceivable variety of type, settings, and casts; of extreme, moderate and very slight demands upon the actors’ skill; tragic, comedic, farcical. And for readers of plays there are certain immutable advantages that have been pointed out before but will bear stressing again, such as that the performance always begins on time, and at your chosen time, and that the actors, being your own creatures, are always ideal.
I shall try to speak first of some anthologies of plays, then of plays by individual authors, and finally of a few books about the drama and the theater.
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First I would put Montrose J. Moses’s ample works. His Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Modern is not only a complete history of the British stage, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1914; it presents the complete texts of twenty-one English and Irish plays superbly representative of its century. Representative Continental Dramas: Revolutionary and Transitional does much the same thing for Europe as a whole. Eight European countries are represented in this anthology, which contains the complete texts of fifteen plays, with a general survey of the development of Continental drama and individual bibliographies. But the greatest demand is for anthologies of one-act plays; a demand richly met by the following standard works:
Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors, compiled by Margaret G. Mayorga, contains the complete texts of twenty-four, all of which have been produced in Little Theaters. Among the dramatists included are Percy Mackaye, Stuart Walker, Jeannette Marks, George Middleton, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Beulah Marie Dix.
Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays edited by Frank Shay and Pierre Loving, is an international selection of astonishing variety and exceptional merit.
Twenty Contemporary One-Act Plays—American, edited by Frank Shay, is an anthology which affords variety of choice for acting and ample variety for the reader.
Barrett H. Clark’s Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish Authors contains complete texts of twenty one-act plays. Some of the authors are Pinero, Jones, Arnold Bennett, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Granville Barker and Lord Dunsany. Mr. Moses is the compiler of Representative One-Act Plays by Continental Authors. Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, Strindberg, Andreyev, Franz Wedekind, Sudermann, von Hofmannsthal, Lavedan are some of the playwrights whose work is included; and the book is equipped with bibliographies.