The present article focuses on short dramatic works by Kenneth Koch (in collected the book One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays) and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński's The Little Theatre of The Green Goose (a selection from which was translated into English by the late Professor Daniel Gerould). Both Koch and Gałczyński, though best known as poets, were also very much interested in theatre. They both wrote full length plays (in the case of Gałczyński these were mainly radio plays), however in this article I will limit my discussion to their shorter works since they are more interesting from the formal point of view. Koch's and Gałczyński's miniature plays could be regarded as radical theatrical experiments, challenging our conception of what is possible in theatre. The very decision to limit the plays' duration to several minutes (the length of the text ranges from several lines to several pages) has almost revolutionary implications. What is crucial for traditional drama – the plot and the character development – becomes largely irrelevant. Some of the plays read like poems – they seem to rely on the images evoked by the stage directions and the characters' speeches; others are more in the vein of cabaret skits.

Daniel Gerould remarks that Gałczyński's The Little Theatre of The Green Goose “was based on the denial of performance” (1977: 62). In fact Gałczyński's little theatre of The Green Goose was an elaborate hoax. The theatre did not exist. Its manager and actors were invented by the poet. Gałczyński published in Przekrój (a very popular Polish weekly) fictitious reviews of its shows, and various announcements concerning the current program; he also ran some kind of a gossip column, disclosing information concerning the actors' private lives, helping thus to support the illusion of the theatre being real.