Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Washington Square Plays
    Washington Square Plays
    Washington Square Plays
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Washington Square Plays

    By Philip Moeller, Lewis Beach, Edward Goodman and Alice Gerstenberg

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "Washington Square Plays" by Philip Moeller, Lewis Beach, Edward Goodman, Alice Gerstenberg. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateNov 26, 2019
    ISBN4057664625045
    Washington Square Plays
    Author

    Philip Moeller

    Award-winning journalist Philip Moeller coauthored the New York Times bestseller Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security and is the author of the companion volumes, Get What’s Yours for Medicare: Maximizing Your Coverage, Minimizing Your Costs and Get What’s Yours for Health Care: How to Get the Best Care at the Right Price. He wrote the “Ask Phil” feature for PBS NewsHour and has also worked for Money and US News & Report as well as several newspapers. He writes the Get What’s Yours newsletter on Substack and provides updates on Medicare and Social Security at his website, GetWhatsYours.org.

    Read more from Philip Moeller

    Related to Washington Square Plays

    Related ebooks

    Performing Arts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ship Of Fools

      Sep 29, 2022

      AS A SIMPLE GLANCE at most of them will tell you, there’s not a whole bunch of fun in being an opera critic — so we tend to greet the faintest prospect of joy with breathless hope. Imagine, then, the bitter gall we had to drink when the summer’s inco

      3 min read

    • Article

      Double Trouble In Chaotic Comedy

      Nov 25, 2021

      THE ARRIVAL OF THE Christmas season is a reminder that while the West End is the beating heart of British theatre, it is in what used to be called the “provinces” — now more delicately in arts-speak the “regions” — that most of the country experience

      3 min read

    • Article

      Getting Wrecked

      May 26, 2022

      It took a while, but a happy truth is gradually dawning on our summer opera companies. Reasons for hauling oneself to Glyndebourne (and its dog-and-pony ringers) have always been only tangentially connected to the witnessing of opera: viz. bitterly c

      3 min read

    • Article

      Spring To Life

      Mar 30, 2023

      ● EVEN BY THE OLYMPIAN standards of the Covent Garden stalls, it was a top effort: the old dude beside me was snoring happily within five minutes of curtain-up on Rusalka. Actually at 200 quid a pop it’s not such a bad deal: for a start, you miss the

      3 min read

    • Article

      For The Love Of Panto

      Dec 17, 2021

      For The Love Of Panto
      7 min read

    • Article

      Why The Play Is No Longer The Thing

      Apr 19, 2023

      ARE there too many musicals in London? Playwright Sir David Hare certainly thinks so. He recently wrote a piece suggesting that they have become ‘the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path’. He cited the example of Oklahoma! occupy

      2 min read

    • Article

      Robert Thicknesse on Opera

      Sep 30, 2021

      WESTERN CIVILIZATION has weathered many a squall: Black Death, the Nazis, Katie Price, but there was always bound to be a last straw — finally provided by, according to UnAwoken arms of the media, the rewritten ending of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Car

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Gall Of Saul

      Nov 30, 2023

      ● I HEAR THINGS ARE PRETTY rocky over in the Middle East, but how infinitely more dreadful had the Cambridge “Uni” production of Handel’s Saul actually gone ahead! Just in time, thank God, they realised how inflammatory it would be to perform this un

      3 min read

    • Article

      Content Warning

      Sep 28, 2023

      Content Warning
      3 min read

    • Article

      2018 Tony Award Predictions: Who Will Win, Who Should Win On Sunday

      Jun 7, 2018

      With "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" likely to do to its rivals nominated for best play what the Dementors do to Ron and Hermione - in one narrative, anyway - most of the tension at the 2018 Tony Awards is likely to revolve far from the wizarding

      3 min read

    • Article

      Arts

      Sep 20, 2023

      HARRY MOUNT THE MIRACLE CLUB (12A) The immortal Alan Partridge once listed the great clichés about Ireland: ‘Leprechauns, shamrock, Guinness, horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons, people with eyebrows on their cheeks… men in p

      15 min read

    • Article

      Hamlet, Frozen And Cinderella: A Guide To The Grand Return Of Theatre

      Apr 26, 2021

      In August 2005, the West End was treated to one of those regrettably never-to-be-forgotten events. In the Duchess Theatre, off the Strand, there was the world premiere of a show that – deep down – longed to be put out of its misery, and very soon wou

      7 min read

    • Article

      Into The Mystic

      Nov 25, 2021

      ATTENTIVE READERS WILL HAVE noticed that this column has spookily become the nerve-centre of the British opera world: like Richard Burton in The Medusa Touch, I merely have to dream up some new batshit hell and it instantly comes to pass. Of course i

      3 min read

    • Article

      Light At The End

      Jan 25, 2024

      ● REFLECTING ON MY DECADES-LONG campaign to destroy opera in Britain, I have to admit in all modesty that it seems to be going rather well. And while everyone credits the Arts Council — and Nicholas Serota’s hommage to East Anglian iconoclast “Smashe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Midsummer Fever Dream

      Jun 24, 2021

      Midsummer Fever Dream
      3 min read

    • Article

      The G&S divide

      Aug 26, 2021

      RUM SORT OF JOINT, COVENT GARDEN. One minute there’s the boss saying: “We can’t just produce La Traviata and La bohème. That way lies artistic ruin,” the next they unveil a season headlining precisely those old boilers, plus a load more cluckers by V

      3 min read

    • Article

      Music To Die For

      Jul 28, 2022

      ● IT MIGHT SAVE EVERYONE a bit of money and effort to display the following woo-alert before any film, play, TV show, opera etc older than about 20 years: The past happened! Get over it — or piss off. The thought was prompted by exciting news that Co

      3 min read

    • Article

      Beyond Black And Yellowface

      Jun 24, 2022

      Beyond Black And Yellowface
      3 min read

    • Article

      Losing The Plot

      Mar 25, 2021

      OF ALL THE HORDES who have a beef with opera, the straight-theatre crowd are by far the sniffiest. Naturally enough, their objections start with the peculiar singing, and pretty soon it’s all Johnson’s “exotic and irrational Entertainment” and the la

      3 min read

    • Article

      Robert Thicknesse on Opera

      Apr 27, 2023

      I WAS AS EXCITED AS everyone else to learn that opera actually exists in New Zealand — two things surely linked before only by their joint gold for the world’s least fashionable phenomena. Not only that, but it turns out that Kiwis have a thriving ne

      3 min read

    • Article

      Merrymaking And Dance

      Nov 22, 2018

      Merrymaking And Dance
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Play’s The Thing

      Apr 15, 2021

      Entertainment in late medieval and Tudor London came in a variety of forms, including cockfighting, bearbaiting and even public executions. Plays at this time often had a religious theme or a moral at the end – such as the battle between good and evi

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Washington Square Plays

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Washington Square Plays - Philip Moeller

      Edward Goodman, Alice Gerstenberg, Philip Moeller, Lewis Beach

      Washington Square Plays

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4057664625045

      Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTION

      PREFACE TO THE PLAYS

      I. THE CLOD

      A One-Act Play

      II. EUGENICALLY SPEAKING

      A One-Act Play

      III. OVERTONES

      A One-Act Play

      IV. HELENA'S HUSBAND

      An Historical Comedy

      INTRODUCTION

      Table of Contents

      The rigid conventionality of the theatre has been frequently remarked upon. Why the world should ever fear a radical, indeed, is hard to see, since he has against him the whole dead weight of society; but least of all need the radical be dreaded in the theatre. When the average person pays money for his amusements, he is little inclined to be pleased with something which doesn't amuse him: and what amuses him, nine times out of ten, is what has amused him. That is why changes in the theatre are relatively slow, and customs long prevail, even till it seems they may corrupt the theatrical world.

      For many generations in our playhouse it was the custom to follow the long play of the evening with an afterpiece, generally in one act, but always brief, and almost always gay, if not farcical. Audiences, which in the early days assembled before seven o'clock, had to be sent home happy. After the tragedy, the slap-stick or the loud guffaw; after Romeo and Juliet, Cibber's Hob in the Well; after King Lear, The Irish Widow. (These two illustrations are taken at random from the programs of the Charleston theatre in 1773.) This custom persisted until comparatively recent times. The fathers and mothers of the present generation can remember when William Warren, at the Boston Museum, would turn of an evening from such a part as his deep-hearted Sir Peter Teazle to the loud and empty vociferations of a Morton farce. The entertainment in those days would hardly have been considered complete without the afterpiece, or, as time went on, sometimes the curtain raiser. It is by no means certain that theatre seats were always cheaper than to-day. In some cases, certainly, they were relatively quite as high. But it is certain that you got more for your money. You frequently saw your favorite actor in two contrasted roles, two contrasted styles of acting perhaps, and you saw him from early evening till a decently late hour. You didn't get to the theatre at 8.30, wait for the curtain to rise on a thin-spun drawing-room comedy at 8.45, and begin hunting for your wraps at 10.35. One hates to think, in fact, what would have happened to a manager fifty years ago who didn't give more than that for the price of a ticket. Our fathers and mothers watched their pennies more sharply than we do.

      For various reasons, one of them no doubt being the growth of cheaper forms of amusement and the consequent desertion from the traditional playhouse of a considerable body of those who least like, and can least afford, to spend money irrespective of returns, the afterpiece and curtain raiser have practically vanished from our stage. They have so completely vanished, in fact, that theatre goers have lost not only the habit of expecting them, but the imaginative flexibility to enjoy them. If you should play Romeo and Juliet to-day and then follow it with a one-act farce, your audience would be uncomfortably bewildered. They would be unable to make the necessary adjustment of mood. If you focus your vision rapidly from a near to a far object, you probably suffer from eye-strain. Similarly, the jump from one play to the other in the theatre gives a modern audience mind- or mood-strain. It is largely a matter of habit. We, to-day, have lost the trick 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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1