The one-act play is an art-form that is worthy of careful cultivation. It shows the same relation to the full-length drama as the short-story shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. A one-act play, in exhibiting the present, should imply the past and intimate the future. The author has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many antecedent causes. The one-act play, at its best, can no more serve as a single act of a longer drama than the short-story can serve as a single chapter of a novel. The form is complete, concise, and self-sustaining; and it requires an extraordinary focus of imagination. No other American dramatist has so carefully cultivated this special type of drama as George Middleton. His recently-published volume of one-act plays, entitled _Possession_, was preceded by two other volumes, called _Embers_ and _Tradition_. Each of these books contains half a dozen plays. From the fact that Mr. Middleton has chosen to publish these eighteen one-act plays in advance of their production, it is not to be inferred that he is a believer in the closet-drama. A closet-drama may be defined as a play that, being unfit for production in the theatre, is fit only to be locked up in a closet. Mr. Middleton is not a literary amateur, but a professional and practical playwright. He has produced more than half a dozen full-length plays in the commercial theatre; and such artists as Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, George Fawcett, and the late E. M. Holland have appeared in dramas of his composition. All of Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays are written for the stage; and—to quote from his own preface to _Possession_—he conceives “the value of play publication not as a substitute for production but as an alternative for those whose dramas may offer little attraction to the manager because of theme or treatment.” At present there is, unfortunately, scarcely any market in the American theatre for one-act plays that take life seriously. It is against our custom to provide a full-length drama with a curtain-raiser or an after-piece; and the field for one-act plays in vaudeville is restricted to slap-stick comedies and yelling melodramas. It is for this reason that Mr. Middleton has been required to choose publication as an alternative for production, in the case of these diminutive dramas. The trouble is not at all that his pieces are unsuited to the stage: they are admirable in technique, and—like all good plays—they would be more interesting in the theatre than in the library. The trouble is only that—for wholly artificial and accidental reasons—the commercial theatre in America at present is inhospitable to the one-act play.