Essay on "One-Act Play"

 Unit-II
Drama
"One-Act Play"

One-Act plays were written & staged throughout the 18th & 19th centuries as “The Curtain Raisers” or “The After Pieces”. They were chiefly farcical & served to amuse the audience before the commencement of the actual drama or were staged for their amusement just after it had come to an end. The famous one-act play “Monkey’s Paw” was first staged as a ‘Curtain Raiser’ & it proved to be more entertaining than the main drama. It may be said to mark the beginning of the modern one-act play.

Chief Characteristics of One-Act Play

(i) One-act play is a play that has only one act but may consist of one or more scenes.

(ii) One-act plays are usually written in a concise manner.

(iii) It deals with a single dominant situation, & aims at producing a single effect.

(iv) It deals with only one theme developed through one situation to one climax in order to produce the maximum effect.

(v) It treats the problems of everyday life like marriage, punishment for crimes, labour conditions, divorce, etc.

(vi) Action begins right at the start of the play.

(vii) There are no breaks in the action, that is, it is continuous since it’s a short play; no intervals.

(viii) Everything superfluous is to be strictly avoided as the play is short & the action takes place within a short period of time. It introduces elaborate stage directions to minimize the time taken by the action itself.

(ix) The creation of mood, or atmosphere is indispensable to its success.

(x) There are three dramatic unities that are observed in the one-act play. The unities are the unity of time, unity of place & the unity of action.

1. Write an essay on "One-act Play'.

1. Introduction

In the history of drama, there have been many short, unified dramatic works that may be properly called one-act plays, but the term is usually employed for those written since the late nineteenth century. As a distinct dramatic type, the one-act play is generally limited in the number of characters as well as in scene changes. Two or three characters in one setting is typical. A single incident, with only a sufficient amount of exposition to establish the chain of events leading up to it, is presented without complicating subplots. The climax frequently occurs in the closing moments of the play.

2. Features of the one-act play

It has only one act. It may or may not be divided into short scenes. It has all the elements that are found in full-length drama-plot, dialogue, characters and setting-but it focuses only upon a single episode or situation. The subject matter of a one-act play may vary from serious to comic. The number of characters is usually limited. Like the longer play, the one-act play has an exposition and rising action. Like the short story, the one-act play also thrives on a twist or surprise ending.

3. Examples of One-act plays

Dramatists such as Hauptmann, Strindberg, G.B Shaw, and O'Neil contributed a number of such plays in the early part of the twentieth century. Some well-known one-act plays include Anton Chekhov's Marriage Proposal (1890) and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958).