Fourteen is a play by Alice Gerstenberg. This one-act social satire was first performed October 7, 1919 at the Maitland Playhouse, 332 Stockton Street, San Francisco, on a bill with three other one-act plays.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle remarked that it "gayly lampoons the question of dinner entertainments".[1]Arthur Maitland's company had just moved into a new 200-seat theater from its previous incarnation as the St. Francis Little Theatre Club in the Colonial Ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel.[2][3]
The play was originally published in the February 1920 issue of The Drama magazine. It is now a public domain work and may be performed without royalties.
Mrs. Pringle is preparing to host a dinner party to introduce her daughter, Elaine, to the city's most eligible bachelor, Oliver Farnsworth. 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.[4][5]
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".[6] A reviewer for the American Library Association called it an "exemplary social farce".[7]
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".[8]
The play has continued to appeal to theater companies and audiences, with several modern productions.[4][9] Reviewing a 2007 production in the New York Times, Anne Midgette described Fourteen as delightfully dated.[10]
