This is the drama reduced to one scene, and why not? One who has had the job of reading plays which are submitted to a theatrical director soon observes that every play seems to have been written for the sake of a single scene, and that all the author's creative joy centered around this scene which sustained him during the terrible pains which exposition, presentation, entanglement, disentanglement, peripeteia, and catastrophe caused him.

For the satisfaction of having written a full-length play, he bores his audience by arousing its curiosity about matters it already knows, harasses the director by making him maintain a large personnel, makes life miserable for those unfortunate actors who play the secondary parts, as well as the critics, the confidants, the raisonneurs, without whom no intrigue or, full-length play can materialize, and to whom he must go to the trouble of giving a character.


return to top | previous page | next page