Date premiered 1919 | First performance 1919 | |
Characters DunhamMrs. PringleElaine Setting The dining room of a New York residence | ||
fourteen by alice gerstenberg
Fourteen is a play by Alice Gerstenberg. This one-act social satire was first performed at Arthur Maitland's Theatre, San Francisco, in 1919 and originally published in the February 1920 issue of The Drama magazine. It is now a public domain work and may be performed without royalties.
Contents
Fourteen suds
Characters
The play has three characters:
Synopsis
Mrs. Pringle is preparing to host a dinner party to introduce her daughter, Elaine, to the city's most eligible bachelor. Illness and a blizzard force some guests to cancel and the three characters are compelled to try to salvage the evening and the dinner-table layout.
Reception
Writing in The Drama magazine, J. Vandervoort Sloan described Gerstenberg as "a progressive young playwright, possibly the best-known and most widely be-played by amateur groups in America" and Fourteen as belonging "in the 'a' class of her plays". A reviewer for the American Library Association called it an "exemplary social farce".
The play was among those "unqualifiedly recommended" for high-school productions in front of "mixed audiences" by a New Jersey public school drama adviser in 1923. The adviser described it as "portraying the contretemps of a dinner party".
The play has continued to appeal to theater companies and audiences, with several modern productions. Reviewing a 2007 production in the New York Times, Anne Midgette described Fourteen as delightfully dated.