Four Plays

FROM HER COLLEGE days onward, Dawn Powell dreamed of becoming a successful playwright. Indeed, over the course of four decades, she finished at least ten plays and was working on fashioning her novel The Golden Spur into a musical comedy during her final illness. Only two of her plays were mounted during her lifetime, however. This volume contains both of those works - Big Night which was produced by the legendary Group Theater in 1933, and Jigsaw, which was staged by the Theater Guild the following year. These are fast-paced, blunt-spoken - and very funny - comedies that directly anticipate the hard-boiled satire of such novels as Turn, Magic Wheel and Angels on Toast. Rounding out the book are two unpublished (and as yet unproduced) plays that Powell wrote in the late 1920s - the experimental, quasi-expressionist Women at Four O'Clock and a nostalgic, bittersweet story of old New York, Walking Down Broadway, which director Erich von Stroheim would later adapt into the Hollywood film Hello, Sister! Eleven of Dawn Powell's fifteen novels are currently available in paperback from Steerforth Press, as well her widely acclaimed diaries. She died in 1965.