LARDNER, Ring

Lardner is remembered mostly as a lightweight writer whose baseball stories were recently collected into a book, Ring Around the Bases (1992). However, it was the critic Martin Esslin (1916), in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), who discovered a more experimental writer in his very short plays. Some of their funniest lines occur in the stage directions, so that the little plays become more effective when read than when seen, Esslin writes. How, for example, is a stage direction like...