Four Plays: Big Night / Women at Four O'Clock / Walking Down Broadway / Jig Saw

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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 Rounding out the book are two unpublished plays that Powell wrote in the late 1920s - the experimental, quasi-expressionist "Women at Four O'Clock" and a nostalgic, bittersweet story of old New York,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.