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How One Act Plays Killed the Theatre

I am not a fan of the One Act Play — even though I’ve written many of them — because I now realize just how ubiquitously they have killed the modern theatre by shaving expectation, shortening audience attention spans and by setting a low-budget watermark for producers and a little-to-none time commitment for directors and actors.  One Act Plays are a cheat against the human spirit, as the convenience of mindless television plotting replaces the tension of the live stage performance.

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Sloth! Apathy! Myopia!

Waiting at the intersection of Broadway and 96th, on the south-west corner, a perfectly anonymous man (he thinks) takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He flips it on one end and gently taps it, to pack the tobacco more tightly and therefore get an ever slightly longer lasting cigarette. He then opens up the pack and pulls the top of the foil lining from inside. Having done so, he proceeds to toss the seemingly useless piece of paper onto the sidewalk about one and a half feet from a trash can.

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