through lack of
practice. The old custom is dead; we are fixed in a new one. If Maude
Adams, for instance, should follow "The Little Minister" with a roaring
farce, or Sothern should turn on the same evening from "If I Were King"
to "Box and Cox," we should feel that some artistic unity had been
rudely violated; nor am I at all sure, being a product of this
generation, but that we should be quite right.

Matters standing as they do, then, it seems to me that the talk
we frequently hear about reviving "the art of the one-act play" by
restoring the curtain raisers or afterpieces to the programs of our
theatres is reactionary and futile. All recent attempts to pad out
a slim play with an additional short one have failed to meet with
approval, even when the short piece was so masterly a work as Barrie's
"The Will," splendidly acted by John Drew, or the same author's "Twelve
Pound Look," acted by Miss Barrymore. Nor is it at all certain that the
one-act plays of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents,
the names of which you may read by the thousands on ancient playbills,
added anything to the store of dramatic literature. Some of them are
decently entombed in the catacombs of Lacy's British Drama, or still
available for amateurs in French's library. Did you ever try to read
one? Of course, there was "Box and Cox," but it is doubtful if there
will be any great celebration at the tercentenary of Morton's death.
For the most part, those ancient afterpieces were frankly padding,
conventional farces to fill up the bill and send the audiences home
happy. To the real art of the drama or the development of the one-act
play as a form of serious literary expression, they made precious little
contribution. They were a theatrical tradition, a convention.

But the one-act play, nonetheless, has an obvious right to existence, as
much as the short story, and there are plentiful proofs that it can be
as terse, vivid, and significant. Most novelists don't tack on a short
story at the end of their books for full measure, but issue their contes
either in collections or in the pages of the magazines. What similar
chances are there, or can there be, for the one-act play, the dramatic
short story?

An obvious chance is offered by vaudeville. The vaudeville audience
is in the mood for rapid alterations of attention; it has the habit of
variety. This is just as much a convention of vaudeville as the single
play is now a convention