Probably no theatrical form has had a longer or hardier life than the one-act. Even if you don't count the ancient Greek tragedies as one-acts that were assembled into triple bills, their performance was always followed by one-act satyr plays burlesquing the tragic material, only one-and-a-half of which, unfortunately, survive. The Elizabethan theater and Renaissance opera both began with two- or three-character "interludes" to sweeten the tragic deal. London's 18th-century playhouses improved on the ancient Greeks, and enhanced their box offices, by tacking "afterpieces," which could be sentimental or musical as well as farcical, onto their already long full-evening plays; 19th-century theater managers topped them by adding "curtain-raisers" before the main piece as well as finishing up with a farce. This went on, according to Bernard Shaw, "until it dawned on the managers that no living person had ever been known to wait for the farce, and accordingly it was dropped." The early 20th-century's mainstream writers, including Shaw himself, churned out one-acts for stars who wanted to make quick money on the vaudeville or music-hall circuits. Most of the century's major dramatists, from the earliest days of the experimental or "little theater" movement to the beginnings of our own off-off Broadway, began with one-acts: Chekhov, Schnitzler, Wedekind, Strindberg, Pirandello, O'Neill, Brecht, Lorca, Wilder, Williams, Miller, Albee, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter, and so on down to Lanford Wilson, John Guare, Adrienne Kennedy, David Mamet, and countless other writers still alive and productive. Some enterprising soul should probably start a cocktail-hour theater devoted to producing a repertoire of... More >>>