Word: one-act
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sprawling ugliness of a three-story Willard Hotel that seems to imprison the audience as well as the players, this pallid version of Broadway's Look Homeward, Angel has just enough story line for a wistful, low-key one-act play. The line goes hopelessly slack in the second and third acts when Playwright Sergel keeps falling back on his first. Even the major Anderson characters seem thin, and for a good reason. Anderson merely sketched them with evocative daubs; his adapter failed to fill them out with the detail demanded by the theater. Out of misapplied reverence...
...Pont Show of the Month: As a "renewer of old treasure," rather than a "maker of new molds," Thornton Wilder found in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee the seed of an idea for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714," he began it, "the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." It posed the intriguing question: Did they die by accident or by divine plan? Its prose was clean and classical, its characters adroitly limned and it was constructed with the delicacy...
...Theatre Workshop's presentation of Bertolt Brecht's one-act play The Exception and the Rule is an extremely interesting exercise in experimental theatre...
...one-act curtain raiser by Tennessee Williams, This Property is Condemned, is equally well-performed, but the play is merely a minor re-working of the inevitable Williams theme of a woman who lives in a world of illusion. The boy who meets the tawdry heroine on a railroad embankment merely establishes the situation. Limited though it is, the part is well-handled by Walter McGinn. Jane Cronin is entrancing as she delivers this bubble-frail poetic monologue without benefit of scenery. She provides an object-lesson in good acting...
Baker himself, in a letter in 1926, demonstrated his respect for O'Neill. "When O'Neill was working for me, he showed by the end of the year that he already knew how to write well in the one-act form, but he could not as yet manage the larger forms...