num_pages: 400
description: 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 Rounding out the book are two unpublished (and as yet unproduced) plays that Powell wrote in the late 1920s - the experimental, quasi-expressionist "Women at Four O'Clock" and a nostalgic, bittersweet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.
language: English
title: Four Plays: Big Night / Women at Four O'Clock / Walking Down Broadway / Jig Saw
titlecomplete: Four Plays: Big Night / Women at Four O'Clock / Walking Down Broadway / Jig Saw
ratings_count: 14
publisher: Steerforth