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The one-act play is a new form of the drama and more emphatically a new form of literature. Its possibilities began to attract the attention of European and American writers in the last decade of the nineteenth century, those years when so many dramatic traditions lapsed and so many precedents were established. It is significant that the oldest play in the present collection is Maeterlinck's The Intruder, published in 1890.

The history of this new form is of necessity brief. Before its vogue became general, one-act plays were being presented in vaudeville houses in this country and were being used as curtain raisers in London theatres for the purpose of marking time until the late-dining audiences should arrive. With the exception of the famous Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris, where the entertainment for an evening might consist of several one-act plays, all of the hair-raising, blood-curdling variety, programs composed entirely of one-act plays were rare. Sir James Matthew Barrie is usually credited with being the first in England to write one-act plays intended to be grouped in a single production. A program of this character has been uncommon in the commercial theatre in America, but three of Barrie's one-act plays, constituting a single program, have met with enthusiastic response from American audiences.

There are two new developments in the history of the theatre that have encouraged and promoted the writing of one-act plays: the one is the Repertory Theatre abroad and the other is the Little Theatre movement on both sides of the Atlantic. The repertory of the Irish Players, for example, is composed largely of one-act plays, and American Little Theatres are given over almost exclusively to the one-act play.

The one-act play is in reality so new a phenomenon, in spite of the use that has been made of the form by playwrights like Pinero, Hauptmann, Chekov, Shaw, and others of the first rank, that it is still generally ignored in books on dramatic workmanship.[1] None the less, the status of the one-act play is established and a study of the plays of this length, which are rapidly increasing in number, discloses certain tendencies and laws which are exemplified in the form itself. Clayton Hamilton sums up the matter well when he says: "The one-act play is admirable in itself, as a medium of art. It shows the same relation to the full-length play as the short-story shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. The method of the one-act play at its best is similar to the method employed by Browning in his dramatic monologues. The author must suggest the entire history of a soul by seizing it at some crisis of its career and forcing the spectator to look upon it from an unexpected and suggestive point of view. A one-act play in exhibiting the present should imply the past and intimate the future. The author has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many antecedent causes. … The form is complete, concise and self-sustaining; it requires an extraordinary force of imagination."[2]

To follow for a moment a train of thought suggested by Mr. Hamilton's timely and appreciative comment on the technique of the one-act play: All writers on the short-story agree that, to use Poe's phrase, "the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity of effect" is indispensable to the successful short-story. This singleness of effect is an equally important consideration in the structure of the one-act play. A short-story is not a condensed novel any more than a one-act play is a condensed full-length play. There is no fixed length for the one-act play any more than there is for the short-story. The one-act play must have its "dominant incident" and "dominant character" like the short-story. The effect of the one-act play, as of the short-story, is measured by the way it makes its readers and spectators feel. Neither the short-story nor the one-act play need necessarily "be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." One has but to consider the short-stories of Henry James or the one-act plays of Galsworthy or of Maeterlinck to be convinced that a violent struggle is not necessary to the art of either form.

This point is further illustrated in what Galsworthy himself says in general about drama in his famous essay, Some Platitudes Concerning the Drama, which should be read in connection with his satirical comedy, The Little Man. In that essay Galsworthy writes: "The plot! A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly rises out of the interplay of circumstance on temperament, and temperament on circumstance, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. A human being is the best plot there is. … Now true dramatic action is what characters do, at once contrary, as it were, to expectation, and yet because they have already done other things. … Good dialogue again is character, marshaled so as continually to stimulate interest or excitement." This commentary of Galsworthy's on dramatic technique offers to the student of The Little Man an unusual opportunity to verify a great critic's theory by a great playwright's practice. It is indeed the character of the Little Man that is the plot in this case; the plot may be said to begin when, according to stage direction, the hapless Baby wails, and to be well launched with the Little Man's deprecatory, "Herr Ober! Might I have a glass of beer?" These words distinguish him immediately from his bullying companions in the buffet. The highest point of interest, like the beginning of the plot, is to be found in the play of the Little Man's personality, at the point where he is left alone with the Baby, now a typhus suspect, and after an instant's wavering, bends all his puny energies to pacifying its uneasy cry. Again, the end of the plot comes with the tribute of the bewildered but adoring mother to the ineffably gentle Little Man.

But a one-act play that has any pretensions to literature must be looked upon as a law unto itself and should not be expected to conform to any set of arbitrary requirements. As a matter of fact, there are only a very few generalizations that can be made with regard to the structure or to the classification of the one-act play. Even this book contains plays that are not susceptible of any hard and fast classification. The Intruder and Riders to the Sea are indubitably tragedies, but Fortune and Men's Eyes, dealing, as it does, with the tragic theme of love's disillusionment, belongs not at all with the plays of Maeterlinck and Synge, shadowed, as they are, by death. And though the deaths are many and bloody in A Night at an Inn, the unreality of the romance is so strong that there is no such wrenching of the human sympathies as we associate with tragedy. The Pierrot of the Minute is superficially a Harlequinade, but Dowson's insistence on the theme of satiety brings it narrowly within the range of satire. Beauty and the Jacobin is rich in comedy; so is Lady Gregory's Spreading the News, and in both, the situations change imperceptibly from comedy to farce and from farce back to comedy.

The laws of the structure of the one-act play are in the nature of dramatic art no less flexible. It can be said that in order to secure that singleness of impression that is as essential to the one-act play as to the short-story, a single well sustained theme is necessary, a theme announced in some fashion early in the play. Indeed since the one-act play is a short dramatic form, it may be said in regard to the announcing of the theme that, "'Twere well it were done quickly." In Spreading the News, the curtain is barely up before Mrs. Tarpey is telling the magistrate: "Business, is it? What business would the people here have but to be minding one another's business?" And at approximately the same moment in the action of The Intruder, the uncle, foreshadowing the theme of the mysterious coming of death, says: "When once illness has come into a house, it is as though a stranger had forced himself into the family circle."

The single dominant theme for its dramatic expression calls also for a single situation developing to a single climax. In the case of Fortune and Men's Eyes, it is the ballad-monger, who in crying his wares,

"Plays, Play not Fair,

Or how a gentlewoman's heart was took By a player, that was King in a stage-play,"

gives us in the first few minutes of the play his ironical clue to the theme. And this theme is worked out in Mary Fytton's shallow intrigue with William Herbert, which culminates in the shattering of the Player's dream on that autumn day in South London at "The Bear and the Angel."

The single situation exemplifying the theme of The Intruder is found in the repeatedly expressed premonitions of the blind Grandfather, stationary in his armchair, whose heightened senses detect the presence of the Mysterious Stranger. The unity of effect secured in this play is only rivaled, not surpassed, by the wonderful totality of impression experienced by the reader of The Fall of the House of Usher. The unity of effect in The Intruder is secured also by Maeterlinck's description of the setting, which reminds the playgoer or the reader inevitably of Stevenson's familiar words: "Certain dark gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted."

In general, as has been said, the plot of the one-act play, because of the time limitations, admits of no distracting incidents. For the same reason the characterization must be swift and direct. By Bartley Fallon's first speech in Spreading the News, Lady Gregory characterizes him completely. He needs but say: "Indeed it's a poor country and a scarce country to be living in. But I'm thinking if I went to America it's long ago the day I'd be dead," and the fundamental part of his character is fixed in the minds of the audience. From that moment it is just a question of filling in the picture with pantomime and further dialogue.

The characterization of the Player in Fortune and Men's Eyes begins at the moment that he enters the tavern, when Wat, the bear-ward, calls out:

"I say, I've played. … There's not one man

Of all the gang—save one. … Ay, there be one

I grant you, now! … He used me in right sort;

A man worth better trades."

Wat's verdict on the fair-mindedness of Master William Shakespeare of the Lord Chamberlain's company is borne out by the Player's own,

"High fortune, man!

Commend me to thy bear."

[Drinks and passes him the cup.]

The entrance of the ballad-monger gives Master Will an opening for a punning jest and, the action continuing, shows him sympathetic to the strayed lady-in-waiting, tender to the tavern boy, magnanimous to the false friend and falser love.

One method of characterization which the author allows herself to use in this play, no doubt to heighten the Elizabethan illusion, is rare in the contemporary drama: when this "dark lady of the sonnets" flees "The Bear and the Angel," the Player breaks forth into the self-revealing soliloquy, found so frequently in his own plays, and continuing as a dramatic convention until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.[3]

Characterization rests in part on pantomime. In The Little Man, the Dutch Youth is dumb throughout the play, but he is sufficiently characterized by his foolish demeanor and his recurrent laugh. The part of the Little Man himself is one long gesture of humility and dedication. In those one-act plays in which the old characters of the Harlequinade reappear, like The Maker of Dreams and The Pierrot of the Minute, pantomime transcends dialogue as a method of characterization. In the plays of the Irish dramatists, Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, pantomime and dialogue contribute equally to the characterization, which is of a very high order, since all these dramatists were close observers of the Irish peasant characters of their plays.

Synge, especially, illustrates the following critical theory of Galsworthy: "The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an austere art, denying itself all license, grudging every sentence devoted to the mere machinery of the play, suppressing all jokes and epigrams severed from character, relying for fun and pathos on the fun and tears of life. From start to finish good dialogue is hand-made, like good lace; clear, of fine texture, furthering with each thread the harmony and strength of a design to which all must be subordinated." A study of the dialogue of Riders to the Sea reveals just this harmony between the dialogue and the inevitability of the plot, the dialogue and the simplicity of the characters.

The dialogue in The Little Man is the very idiom one would expect to issue from the mouth of the German colonel, the Englishman with the Oxford voice, or the intensely national American, as the case may be. The characters, though they have type names, are, as Mr. Galsworthy would probably be the first to explain, highly individualized. The author does not intend us to think that all Americans are like this loud-voiced traveler, or all Englishmen like the pharisaical gentleman who gives his wife the advertisements to read while he secures the news sheet for himself.

The function of dialogue is the same both in the long and in the short play. For, of course, both forms have many things in common. For instance, as in the full-length play it is necessary for the dramatist to carry forward the interest from act to act, to provide a "curtain" that will leave the audience in a state of suspense, so in the one-act play, the interest must be similarly relayed though the plot is confined to a single act. In The Intruder, every premonition expressed by the Grandfather grips the audience in such a way that they await from minute to minute the coming of the mysterious stranger. The tension is high in A Night at an Inn from the moment the curtain rises. In Riders to the Sea, the beginning of the suspense coincides with the opening of the play and lasts. "They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me," says Maurya, and the audience experiences a rush of relief and a sense of release that the last words, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied," seem only to deepen.

A one-act play, then, has many structural features in common with the short-story; its plot must from beginning to end be dominated by a single theme; its crises may be crises of character as well as conflicts of will or physical conflicts; it must by a method of foreshadowing sustain the interest of the audience unflaggingly, but ultimately relieve their tension; it must achieve swift characterization by means of pantomime and dialogue; and its dialogue must achieve its effects by the same methods as the dialogue of longer plays, but by even greater economy of means. But when all is said and done, the success of a one-act play is judged not by its conformity to any set of hard and fast rules, but by its power to interest, enlighten, and hold an audience.