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Theater of Impotence: The One-Act Tragedy at the Tum of the Century GAIL FINNEY Although the one-act play has enjoyed its florescence during the last hundred years, the roots of the genre go back much further. Precursors of the form may be found in the short, comic scenes produced by the medieval theater, particularly in Spain and England, and in the Shrovetide plays popular in Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In its modem form the one-act play first appeared in seventeenth-century France, where it was cultivated by Moliere and others, and it proliferated in Germany during the following century. Yet throughout these years and even down through most of the nineteenth century, the one-act play was a subsidiary form. Its subject matter was rarely serious, and it was most often performed either as a"curtain raiser" or prelude to a longer play, as an intermezzo to entertain the audience while scenery and costumes were being changed, or as an afterplay, for example to cheer up viewers following a tragedy. I This situation began to change, however, just before 1890. Any glance at a list of one-act plays and their dates reveals that it was only at this time that one-acts of serious literary value and enduring popularity began to be written in numbers. The birth ofthe one-act as an independent and respected genre around 1890 indicates that it met certain needs of both dramatists and theater audiences at the tum of the century. Many of these needs are touched on in the flfst programmatic attempt to define the one-act play, Strindberg's "On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre" (1889), later retitled ''The One-Act Play." The essay was timed to appear simultaneously with the opening of Strindberg's short-lived experimental theater in Copenhagen, which was modeled on Antoine's Thefitre Libre. In attempting in the essay to explain the prevalence of the one-act play at the Thefitre Libre, Strindberg observes that most full-length plays seem to have been written for the sake of a single scene anyway, and adds that "one has to put up with a lot of superfluous nonsense to get to the gist of the matter.,,2 He writes that: "The taste of the period, this headlong, hectic period, 452 GAIL FINNEY seems to move toward the brief and expressive" (p. 20), and goes so far as to conjecture that the one-act play may become the formula for drama in the future. Strindberg himselfwas to write eleven one-acts by 1892, many ofwhich are still performed, and the popularity of the genre up to our own day, in particular its culmination and predominance in the theater of the absurd, has at least in part borne out his prediction. In light of the association of "On Modem Drama and Modem Theatre" with Strindberg's experimental theater, it is not surprising that the essay praises the one-act play for its naturalism, by which the author means not photographic realism but psychological verisimilitude. Strindberg commends the genre's rejection of complicated and unlikely external intrigue in favor of a concern with inner processes. His emphasis here on the one-act's inherent unity of time and place, and thus ofmood, echoes his famous preface to LadyJulie (I 888), in which he justifies that play's one-act structure by speCUlating that the audience's capacity for illusion might be disturbed by intermissions that would disrupt the "dramatist-hypnotist's suggestive influence.'" Writing on Lady Julie, Evert Sprinchom gets to the heart ofthe matter with his comment that "an interrupted climax is no climax at all.'" And yet, although Strindberg and others focus in this early period on the naturalistic potential ofthe one-act play, we find the genre beginning to flourish at the same time in symbolist theater as well. On the most obvious level, this convergence points to the fact that toward the tum ofthe century both naturalist and symbolist dramatists were seeking formal alternatives to the conventional, well-made, full-length play of nineteenth-century French drama. But a close look at the one-act discloses similarities between naturalist and symbolist theater...

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