The one-act play has had a curious life in American literature. For the playwright, this most diminutive of dramatic forms has traditionally offered little in terms of commercial potential, critical acclaim, or even peer acknowledgement. Few one-acts have won the Pulitzer Prize or the Tony Award for Best Play. The attraction of the one-act play, rather, is personal to the playwright—a chance to encapsulate a sliver of human drama.
But the American theatre's relationship to the one-act is evolving, a process now more than 25 years in the making. The bottom line is at play: it's clearly cheaper to produce one-acts, whether it's a multiweek festival or a single night of sketches. Then there are intangible factors, like how the attention span of audiences seems, every year, ever shorter. Whatever the reason, the one-act genre is enjoying a rapturous renaissance.
Who produces one-acts? Everyone, it seems, but there are three main categories. First, there are the trailblazing warhorses: Ensemble Studio Theater's annual Marathon Series (now in its 25th year); Actors Theatre of Louisville's National Ten-Minute Play Contest; the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Original Short Play Festival. Then a middle tier: Women's Project and Productions' Tandem Acts Festival; the Turnip Theatre Company's 15-Minute Play Festival; the Cherry Lane Alternative's AlterNATION One-Act Festival. Then the new vanguard, from short-form festivals held in hotel swimming pools to one-acts written on the A train.
EST's Estimation
The EST Marathon is arguably the highest profile one-act festival in the country. In recent years, such top-drawer playwrights as Horton Foote, Romulus Linney, Christopher Durang, Arthur Miller, and David Mamet have been represented, usually balanced by a dollop of newcomers. The Marathon offers 12 premieres in three series running two weeks each, four plays per series.
According to Artistic Director Curt Dempster, the Marathon presents "the finest one-act writing in the country," culling from over 1,000 plays submitted each year. "We get so many plays," he says, "it takes weeks to cut down to 100 plays, more time to get to 50, to 25, to 12. It's very time-consuming." The process, however, gives Dempster an ongoing window into the state of contemporary short-form playwriting, and after 25 years of mounting Marathons, his perspective on the genre is unquestionably well-informed.
"One-act plays are short ideas—self-contained actions," he says. "One obvious difference between one-acts and full-length plays is that full-lengths suggest an emergency situation, something that takes longer to be resolved. [Playwright] Frank Gilroy calls them 'one-punch plays' because they're usually fast, economic, lean, and muscular. It's a snapshot."
It's also, Dempster believes, a terrific way for producers and artistic directors to uncover and present talent, and that's why he created the Marathon. "It was as if one day all the imaginative producers disappeared. Originally there was [producer] Dick Barr, who helped Edward Albee to acclaim because of his one-acts—'The Zoo Story' and 'The American Dream.' Not long ago, though, playwrights wouldn't write one-acts because no one would produce them. They go back in our history; they go back to Europe in the 19th century. O'Neill was the first American writer popularized by one-acts, and lots of modern writers came along because their one-acts got attention. Off-Broadway producers—in the late '60s and '70s, the American theatre's golden age—used to produce one-acts to introduce new writers, like John Guare and Sam Shepard. When that stopped, we stepped in."
Dempster prefers subject matter "across a vast and broad spectrum" that shows how "singular the imaginations" of the playwrights are. He concedes that the Marathon tends, if slightly, to favor established writers, becuase "the more accomplished the writer is, the more interesting the stuff tends to be."
Foote's Findings
In this year's Marathon, there is perhaps no more accomplished a playwright than Horton Foote—his play "Prisoner's Song" runs in Series B. But Foote, who won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Young Man From Atlanta" and Oscars for the screenplays to "Tender Mercies" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," believes one-act writing doesn't stem from affection for the form. The playwright, rather, "must sense" whether the one-act format works best for the story being told.
"Writing a one-act is challenging because you have to be very strict in choice of material—not all material lends itself," Foote says. "You have to be strict in your requirements—there's no room for wandering. And I just think some things call for one form and some call for another. You follow your instinct." Foote notes that several of his full-length works "don't have intermissions because I hate them—going out and talking about everything but the play."
With his long one-act, "The Carpetbagger's Children," concurrently enjoying a successful Lincoln Center run, the 86-year-old Foote says he's pleased with today's one-act landscape. "When I first began writing, you couldn't give [one-acts] away. Even today, I think it's hard to define what audiences find appealing about one-acts."
Foote adds that he rues the fact that young writers can't train in live television as he did. "In those early days, I wrote many scripts. They were one-acts. There was no difference between writing for television and theatre—it was live, you couldn't stop the show, and if actors went up on their lines, they couldn't be cued." He says most, if not all, of the scripts he wrote for television have been published—as one-act plays.
Riedy's Ready, Feeney's Fecund
Another EST member, David Riedy, had his one-act, "Late Night in the Women's Restroom of the Jungle Bar," featured in last year's Marathon. He's also part of The Lexington Group, an eight-member actor/writer collective which presented another short-form piece, "The Ballad of Larry the Flyer," in last year's New York International Fringe Festival.
Riedy also participated in "The A Train Plays," produced May 16 and 17 by Lawrence Feeney, an actor, at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Here's how it worked: Before boarding an A train at 207th Street in upper Manhattan, Riedy and five fellow playwrights chose a number from a hat, marked two through four, then selected that number of headshots from a second hat. They then hopped the A train, riding it to the end—to Far Rockaway—using their observational and dramaturgical skills to write six brand new one-acts. Returning to 59th Street, their ten- to 15-minute scripts were shuttled off to Kinko's for copying, then handed to the directors and actors for an 11 pm rehearsal. After a brush-up the next afternoon, the performance began.
"I was lucky to be connected to the project," Riedy says, "because it was a fantastic exercise. As a playwright, I think sometimes the best experience comes by showing up with a pad of paper or a laptop and seeing what comes to you. Not knowing what you're writing—and it doesn't take two hours to write a one-act—is an exercise in confronting fear."
The event was also refreshing for Riedy because, after years of crafting one-acts, he discovered "you still can't get an agent until you've written longer plays" and has thus, of late, only been penning full-length works. But "writing one-acts is something playwrights love to do. Instead of going for base hits, you're going for a home run."
Meanwhile, Feeney says his impetus for the "A Train Plays" came "as 'what if?"' while riding the subway at five in the morning. "I remember sitting there, thinking to myself, 'Man, I wish I had a pen.' The things, the influences we see underneath New York are funny and frightening, full of characters and information." In establishing the event's parameters, Feeney decreed that all plays must be set on the A train "and played on a bare stage—maybe some benches, that's it."
The Art of the Pospisil
Another "A Train" dramatist was Craig Pospisil, who by day is director of nonprofessional licensing at the Dramatists Play Service. Pospisil also recently won the Turnip Theatre Company's 8th annual 15-Minute Play Festival.
"What started me writing one-acts," he says, "was actually the National Ten-Minute Play Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Pretty much everything I had written before were full-length plays. But after reading about the contest while at NYU, something struck me. I think the attraction is that, for all its confines, the one-act is a remarkably freeing form, which is a paradox—the more you hem yourself in, the more options you have. See, if a play can take place anywhere, it's difficult to ask yourself 'what's the play about?' If a play happens on a train, though, you think about everything that could happen on a train."
Turnip's contest, Pospisil says, receives 300 to 400 submissions a year. From that pile, 32 15-minute pieces are selected, with four plays presented over eight nights. The plays, he says, are self-produced ("they're not looking for incredible set values") and "audiences vote for their first, second, and third choices."
Following audience voting with a weighted ballot—plays get points for even second- and third-place showings—eight plays and two "producers' choice" plays go to the finals—with each play done three times. Then the audience votes again. Pospisil won for his absurdist comedy, "The American Dream Revisited."
"The best thing about writing one-acts is you have to get to the point," he says. "There's no time for exposition—which is a great learning tool when you go back to writing full-lengths, because you discover more quickly how much exposition you really need. Another thing about writing one-acts is the way you can set up a situation and then kind of explode it in ways that you wouldn't do in a full-length work. My work, when I started, was much more naturalistic and/or realistic, but then I found myself moving in a more kind of absurdist realm—trying wilder things that I wouldn't have tried if I wasn't working with the form. Basically, writing one-acts makes you a more inventive playwright."
Swimming for Scenarios
Like the "A Train Plays," Word of Mouth Productions prizes invention. Every other summer, the company produces a one-act play festival in a particular, if peculiar, location—the center ring at a boxing club, for example. This year, "Swim Shorts" occurs in a rooftop swimming pool at the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street, running August 1-25. Co-produced by J. Edward Cecala, the series consists of two sets of five plays performed eight to ten times each.
In explaining the rationale for choosing offbeat locations, Artistic Director Seth Kramer, a playwright himself, says his goal is to "push the confines of what theatre is. Sure, you can get a black box and put on the same Sam Shepard show. But it's all the same theatre, over and over. By saying you're at a swimming pool on a roof, what we're really doing is telling the writer, 'use the surroundings, figure out how to make it work,' and challenging them to write something new."
Kramer says the company's name is deliberate: via word of mouth is how they call for scripts and fill houses. In addition, "we do not have an exclusive membership. If you write a new play, you can get it read. And when we do readings—or events like 'Swim Shorts'—we email a couple of hundred people and it's amazing what response we get."
What makes a good one-act for Kramer? "The usual things—a beginning, middle, and end; every character going somewhere; funny plays being funny; dramas having conflict. What we really want, though, are plays that really use the space. That's the challenge."
The AlterNATION Alternative
While there's an optimism—and idealism—to the "A Train Plays" and "Swim Shorts," the fact remains that many one-act plays will have a hard time finding an afterlife in regional productions. According to Tracy Johnson of AlterNATION, the Cherry Lane Alternative One-Act Festival, it's not that writing the next "Art" should be the goal—far from it—but writers and producers of one-act festivals really ought to do so with the understanding that "[one-act] plays are very different fare from what many other companies present during the year."
In that sense, this third annual festival is endeavoring to turn a challenge into a virtue, with a series of ten-minute plays presented over eight nights. In terms of subject matter, Johnson "looks for something that has a complete story to it, even though it's obviously very, very short—and a climax that's good."
And above all, she adds, "we're looking for diversity in our evenings. I don't think its easy to write a one-act—I think, in some ways, it takes more time to convey your ideas to the audience, which I find very interesting. Plays are performed "pretty bare-bones," she says, with the actors off-book and with some costumes, props, and set pieces available.
Whereas in previous years the Cherry Lane festival featured as many as 11 short-form plays over two weeks, this year they plan to select eight plays.
Once selected for the festival, Johnson specifically goes out of her way not to "ask [playwrights] to change their plays in any way—we take them as we get them. My goal has been to try and get artists, like directors, involved who were involved in previous years—to sort of pair up good writers with a director. We've also been very successful in getting former semifinalists from the Mentor Project (another Cherry Lane program) involved."
Ten Minutes, Tons of Chances
As Dramaturg/Director of New Play Development at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Amy Wegener is continually focused on their National Ten-Minute Play Contest, the largest of its kind in the country. Like the EST Marathon, the Louisville event has helped transform the one-act genre from a backwater into a chic theatrical niche.
Wegener believes one reason the one-act is increasingly popular—why more companies are calling for them and producing them—is because "you enter the world of a play and let it take you on a journey that doesn't end until the play is over. If you look across the country—not just here—you'll see lots of full-length plays being written without act breaks."
Each year, Wegener says, Actors Theatre receives "between 1,300 and 2,000 ten-minute plays—and we have a completely open door, so anyone can submit. After the annual Dec. 31 deadline, we do first and second reads on the plays—everyone in the office reads. We also have some trained readers we trust. After that, we narrow it down to a finalist list by the summer, and those plays then are in consideration for various production opportunities."
The opportunities, she says, come frequently. "First, there are always ten-minute plays in the Humana Festival. In addition, there are ten-minute plays that get read by our apprentice company—it has 22 actors so it's always needing new material."
In evaluating the mountain of submissions, Wegener gives voice to what is perhaps the number one reason why one-acts and one-act festivals hold such an allure for everyone involved in the process, audiences included. "I think the idea that you can put several plays together to make an evening of theatre—that you can juxtapose ideas in complementary ways that reverberate off of one another, or plays by the same author in one evening—is an interesting approach. With ten-minute plays you can do four or eight a night, and constantly challenge the audience to enter worlds which are brief and self-contained. It's just irresistible."