Frank Shay is the compiler of Twenty-Five Short Plays: International, in which is much exotic work—plays from Bengal and Burma, China and Japan and Uruguay, as well as from countries with whose drama we have more contact. But as an example of Mr. Shay’s selections we may note, from among the writers whose work is fairly familiar, that Austria is represented by a Schnitzler piece, Italy by one of Robert Bracco’s comedies, Hungary by Lajos Biro’s “The Bridegroom,” Russia by an example of Chekhov and Spain by Echegaray.
I may at this point advantageously call attention to Mr. Shay’s One Thousand and One Plays for the Little Theatre, and his new One Thousand and One Longer Plays—not anthologies, but exhaustive lists. The plays are listed alphabetically by authors and by organizations, and the title, nature of the work, number of men and women characters, publisher, and price of each play is given.
Certain other books, though offering a number of one-act plays, have too few inclusions to be described as anthologies. Such are One-Act Plays from the Yiddish, translated by Etta Block and presenting half a dozen effective pieces; Three Modern Japanese Plays, translated by Yozan T. Iwasaki and Glenn Hughes, and showing the direct result of Western influences on the Japanese theatre; and Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays, by A. P. Herbert and others, one of the British Drama League series.
Colin Campbell Clements, whose Plays for a Folding Theatre is known to most amateurs, has a new book this season called Plays for Pagans, containing five entertaining short plays, all easy of stage production. Another such group is to be found in Garden Varieties, by Kenyon Nicholson, six plays, most of them farcical and amusing.
Certain other one-act plays I shall speak of later in this chapter. But the record of excellent anthologies is not yet completed. A Treasury of Plays for Children, by Mr. Moses, provides fourteen dramas with the abundance of incident and action which young people demand but with considerable literary merit besides. Mr. Shay, again, is the compiler of A Treasury of Plays for Women, eighteen in all, requiring only women to cast or containing only such male characters as may easily be enacted by women; and also of A Treasury of Plays for Men, twenty-one altogether, which men may stage without feminine help. A Treasury of Plays for Men also offers a working library list for the Little Theater and a bibliography of other anthologies.
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In coming to the work of individual playwrights, I am afraid the method of conscientious enumeration must to a great extent go on. Granville Barker’s work is almost too well-known to require special comment. His plays, some one of which is almost certain to be found in any comprehensive anthology, are published in seven volumes, each a single drama except the Three Short Plays. Anatol, to be sure, is simply Mr. Barker’s splendid version of Arthur Schnitzler’s gay satire on a gilded youth of Vienna. Probably Waste, at once intimate in its discussions and intensely serious, is the best-known drama by Barker; but The Madras House, with its humors of feminine psychology, and The Voysey Inheritance, that fine study of middle-class English family life, are both popular. The others are The Marrying of Ann Leete, at once a comedy and a satire, and the three-act play called The Secret Life, a play of present-day England touched with philosophy and mysticism and occasional cynicism, but of the same distinctive quality as Barker’s other work.
Three plays by Lewis Beach have been published. A Square Peg presents the tragic results of a mother’s unflinching rule of her family. The Goose Hangs High is a comedy of family loyalty and affection which brings the younger generation face to face with its elders; it has been a success of the last New York season. But the one to which I want to direct attention especially is Ann Vroome, a play in seven scenes giving the story of a girl’s long wait for happiness when she postpones marriage to care for her parents. This play has a very fine acceleration of dramatic interest, of emotional intensity; and its literary quality is of a high order. It is evident that Mr. Beach does nothing badly.
The history of Owen Davis has been told many times, but I do not suppose its impression of the extraordinary is ever lessened. He wrote, for years, melodramas of the “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model” order; I am by no means sure he did not write “Nellie.” In those days he supplied the theaters of the Bowery and other avenues no better as to art if less notorious. It should be said that however cheap were these works, they were infinitely more respectable and of a better moral character than some pretentious affairs playing uptown. Mr. Davis had two reasonable purposes—to learn play writing and to make necessary money. When he had accomplished both, being still a young man, he turned to work of a different description. His play, The Detour (1921), the story of a woman’s never-dying aspiration and hope, was one of the finest things of its season. Clear-cut, dramatic, with comedy and pathos interwoven, it depicted mental and spiritual force pitted against solely material ambition in a way that those who saw or read it did not forget. The evidence was clear that a new American dramatist of the first rank had been born. Icebound (1922), had immediate attention and very marked critical praise, crowned by the award to it of the Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University as the best American play of the year.
The most successful American playwright of his day, Clyde Fitch was also one of the ablest. The Memorial Edition of the Plays of Clyde Fitch, edited, with introductions, by Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson, and published in four volumes is a gallant and important affair. The edition is definitive and contains three plays that were never before in print, “The Woman in the Case,” “Lovers’ Lane,” and that most important of the Fitch plays, “The City.” The fourth volume of this edition contains Mr. Fitch’s address on “The Play and the Public.”[78]