METHOD AND STRUCTURE
I
So far we have considered the material of the dramatist, his theme and
subject matter, and his attitude toward it. But his method in conceiving
this material and of handling it is of great importance and we may now
examine this a little in detail, to realize the peculiar problem that
confronts him.
At the beginning let it be understood that the dramatist must see his
subject dramatically. Every stage story should be seen or conceived in a
central moment which is the explanation of the whole play, its reason
for being. Without that moment, the drama could not exist; if the story
were told, the plot unfolded without presenting that scene, the play
would fall flat, nay, there would, strictly speaking, be no play there.
That is why the French (leaders in nomenclature, as in all else
dramatic) call it the _scene a faire_, the scene that one must do; or,
to adopt the English equivalent offered by Mr. Archer in his interesting
and able manual of stagecraft entitled _Playmaking_, the obligatory
scene: that is, the scene one is obliged to show. This moment in the
story is a climax, because it is the crowning result of all the
preceding growth of the drama up to a point where the steadily
increasing interest has reached its height and an electric effect of
suspense and excitement results. This suspensive excitement depends upon
the clash of human wills against each other or against circumstances;
events are so tangled that they can be no further involved and something
must happen in the way of cutting the knot; the fates of the persons are
so implicated that their lives must be either saved or destroyed, in
order to break the deadlock. Thus along with the clash goes a crisis
presented in a breathless climactic effect which is the central and
imperative scene of the piece, the backbone of every good play.
If this obligatory scene be absent, you may at once suspect the
dramatist; whatever his other virtues (fine dialogue, excellent
characterization, or still other merits), it is probable he is not one
genuinely called to tell a story in the manner of drama within stage
limitations.
It is sometimes said that a play is written backward. The remark has in
mind this fundamental fact of the climax; all that goes before leads up
to it, is preparation for it, and might conceivably be written after the
obligatory scene has been conceived and shaped; all that comes after it
is an attempt to retire gracefully from the great moment, rounding it
out, showing its results, and conducting the spectator back to the
common light of day in such a way as not to be dull, or conventional or
anti-climactic. What follows this inevitable scene is (however
disguised) at bottom a sort of bridge conveying the auditor from the
supreme pleasure of the theater back to the rather humdrum experience of
actual life; it is an experiment in gradation. And the prepared
play-goer will deny the coveted award of _well done_ to any play, albeit
from famous hands and by no means wanting in good qualities, which
nevertheless fails in this prime requisite of good drama: the central,
dynamic scene illuminating all that goes before and follows after,
without which the play, after all, has no right to existence.
With the coming of the modern psychologic school of which Galsworthy,
Barker and Bennett are exemplars, there is a distinct tendency to
minimize or even to eliminate this obligatory scene; an effort which
should be carefully watched and remonstrated against; since it is the
laying of an axe at the roots of dramatic writing. It may be confessed
that in some instances the results of this violation of a cardinal
principle are so charming as to blind the onlooker perhaps to the
danger; as in the case of _Milestones_ by Messrs. Bennett and Knoblauch,
or _The Pigeon_ by Galsworthy, or Louis Parker's Georgian picture,
_Pomander Walk_. But this only confuses the issue. Such drama may prove
delightful for other reasons; the thing to bear in mind is that they are
such in spite of the giving up of the peculiar, quintessential merit of
drama in its full sense. Their virtues are non-dramatic virtues, and
they succeed, in so far as success awaits them, in spite of the
violation of a principle, not because of it. They can be, and should be,
heartily enjoyed, so long as this is plainly understood and the two
accomplishments are perceived as separate. For it may be readily granted
that a pleasant and profitable evening at the theater may be spent,
without the very particular appeal which is dramatic coming into the
experience at all. There are more things in the modern theater than
drama; which is well, if we but make the discrimination.
But for the purposes of intelligent comprehension of what is drama, just
that and naught else, the theater-goer will find it not amiss to hold
fast to the idea that a play without its central scene hereinbefore
described is not a play in the exact definition of that form of art,
albeit ever so enjoyable entertainment. The history of drama in its
failures and successes bears out the statement. And of all nations,
France can be studied most profitably with this in mind, since the
French have always been past masters in the feeling for the essentially
dramatic, and centuries ago developed the skill to produce it. The fact
that we get such a term as the _scene a faire_ from them points to this
truth.
Accepting the fact, then, that a play sound in conception and
construction has and must have a central scene which acts as a
centripetal force upon the whole drama, unifying and solidifying it, the
next matter to consider is the subdivision of the play into acts and
scenes. Since the whole story is shown before the footlights, scenes and
acts are such divisions as shall best mark off and properly accentuate
the stages of the story, as it is unfolded. Convention has had something
to do with this arrangement and number, as we learn from a glance at the
development of the stage story. The earlier English drama accepted the
five-act division under classic influence, though the greatest dramatist
of the past, Shakespeare, did so only half-heartedly, as may be realized
by looking at the first complete edition of his plays, the First Folio
of 1621. _Hamlet_, for instance, as there printed, gives the first two
acts, and thereafter is innocent of any act division; and _Romeo and
Juliet_ has no such division at all. But with later editors, the classic
tradition became more and more a convention and the student with the
modernized text in hand has no reason to suspect the original facts. An
old-fashioned work like Freitag's _Technique of the Drama_ assumes this
form as final and endeavors to study dramatic construction on that
assumption.
The scenes, too, were many in the Elizabethan period, for the reason
that there was no scene shifting in the modern sense; as many scenes
might therefore be imagined as were desirable during the continuous
performance. It has remained for modern technic to discover that there
was nothing irrevocable about this fivefold division of acts; and that,
in the attempt at a general simplification of play structure, we can do
better by a reduction of them to three or four. Hence, five acts have
shrunk to four or three; so that to-day the form preferred by the best
dramatic artists, looking to Ibsen for leadership, is the three-act
play, though the nature of the story often makes four desirable. A
careful examination of the best plays within a decade will serve to show
that this is definitely the tendency.
The three-act play, with its recognition that every art structure should
have a beginning, middle and end--Aristotle's simple but profound
observation on the tragedy of his day--might seem to be that which marks
the ultimate technic of drama; yet it would be pedantic and foolish to
deny that the simplification may proceed further still and two acts
succeed three, or, further still, one act embrace the complete drama,
thus returning to the "scene individable" of the Greeks and Shakespeare.
Certainly, the whole evolution of form points that way.
But, whatever the final simplification, the play as a whole will present
certain constructive problems; problems which confront the aim ever to
secure, most economically and effectively, the desired dramatic result.
The first of these is the problem of the opening act, which we may now
examine in particular.
II
The first act has a definite aim and difficulties that belong to itself
alone. Broadly speaking, its business is so to open the story as to
leave the audience at the fall of the first curtain with a clear idea of
what it is about; not knowing too much, wishing to know more, and having
well in mind the antecedent conditions which made the story at its
beginning possible. If, at the act's end, too much has been revealed,
the interest projected forward sags; if too little, the audience fails
to get the idea around which the story revolves, and so is not
pleasurably anxious for its continuance. If the antecedent conditions
have not clearly been made manifest, some omitted link may throw
confusion upon all that follows. On the other hand, if too much time has
been expended in setting forth the events that lead up to the story's
start on the stage, with the rise of the curtain, not enough time may be
left, within act limits, to hold the attention and fix interest so it
may sustain the entr'act break and fasten upon the next act.
Thus it will be seen that a successful opening act is a considerable
test of the dramatist's skill.
Another drawback complicates the matter. The playwright has at his
disposal in the first act from half to three-quarters of an hour in
which to effect his purpose. But he must lose from five to ten minutes
of this precious time allotment, at the best very short, because,
according to the detestable Anglo-Saxon convention, the audience is not
fairly seated when the play begins, and general attention therefore not
riveted upon the stage action. Under ideal conditions, and they have
never existed in all respects in any time or country, the audience will
be in place at the curtain's rise, alert to catch every word and
movement. As a matter of fact, this practically never occurs;
particularly in America, where the drama has never been taken so
seriously as an art as music; for some time now people have not been
allowed, in a hall devoted to that gentle sister art, to straggle in
during the performance of a composition, or the self-exploitation of a
singer, thereby disturbing the more enlightened hearers who have come on
time, and regard it, very properly, as part of their breeding to do so.
But in the theater, as we all know, the barbarous custom obtains of
admitting late comers, so that for the first few minutes of the
performance a steady insult is thus offered to the play, the players,
and the portion of the audience already in their seats. It may be hoped,
parenthetically, that as our theater gradually becomes civilized this
survival of the manners of bushmen may become purely historic. At
present, however, the practical playwright accepts the existing
conditions, as perforce he must, and writes his play accordingly. And so
the first few minutes of a well-constructed drama, it may be noticed,
are generally devoted to some incident, interesting or amusing in
itself, preferably external so as to catch the eye, but not too vital,
and involving, as a rule, minor characters, without revealing anything
really crucial in the action. The matter presented thus is not so much
important as action that leads up to what is important; and its lack of
importance must not be implied in too barefaced a way, lest attention be
drawn to it. This part of the play marks time, and yet is by way of
preparation for the entrance of the main character or characters.
Much skill is needed, and has been developed, in regard to the
marshaling of the precedent conditions: to which the word _exposition_
has been by common consent given. Exposition to-day is by no means what
it was in Shakespeare's; indeed, it has been greatly refined and
improved upon. In the earlier technic this prefatory material was
introduced more frankly and openly in the shape of a prologue; or if the
prologue was not used, at least the information was conveyed directly
and at once to the audience by means of minor characters, stock figures
like the servant or confidante, often employed mainly, or even solely,
for that purpose. This made the device too obvious for modern taste, and
such as to injure the illusion; the play lost its effect of presenting
truthfully a piece of life, just when it was particularly important to
seem such; that is, at the beginning. For with the coming of the subtler
methods culminating in the deft technic of an Ibsen, which aims to draw
ever closer to a real presentation of life on the stage, and so strove
to find methods of depiction which should not obtrude artifice except
when unavoidable, the stage artist has learned to interweave these
antecedent circumstances with the story shown on the stage before the
audience. And the result is that to-day the exposition of an Ibsen, a
Shaw, a Wilde, a Pinero or a Jones is so managed as hardly to be
detected save by the expert in stage mechanics. The intelligent
play-goer will derive pleasure and profit from a study of Ibsen's growth
in this respect; observing, for example, how much more deftly exposition
is hidden in a late work like _Hedda Gabler_ than in a comparatively
early one like _Pillars of Society_; and, again, how bald and obvious
was this master's technic in this respect when he began in the middle
of the nineteenth century to write his historical plays.
In general, it is well worth while to watch the handling of the first
act on the part of acknowledged craftsmen with respect to the important
matter of introducing into the framework of a two hours' spectacle all
that has transpired before the picture is exhibited to the spectators.
One of the definite dangers of the first act is that of giving an
audience a false lead as to character or turn of story. By some bit of
dialogue, or even by an interpolated gesture on the part of an actor who
transcends his rights (a misleading thing, as likely as not to be
charged to the playwright), the auditor is put on a wrong scent, or
there is aroused in him an expectation never to be realized. Thus the
real issue is obscured, and later trouble follows as the true meaning is
divulged. A French critic, commenting on the performance in Paris of a
play by Bernard Shaw, says that its meaning was greatly confused because
two of the characters took the unwarranted liberty of exchanging a
kiss, for which, of course, there was no justification in the stage
business as indicated by the author. All who know Shaw know that he has
very little interest in stage kisses.
Closely associated with this mistake, and far more disastrous, is such a
treatment of act one as to suggest a theme full of interest and
therefore welcome, which is then not carried through the remainder of
the drama. Fitch's _The City_ has been already referred to with this in
mind. A more recent example may be found in Veiller's popular melodrama,
_Within the Law_. The extraordinary vogue of this melodrama is
sufficient proof that it possesses some of the main qualities of
skillful theater craft: a strong, interesting fable, vital
characterization, and considerable feeling for stage situation and
climax, with the forthright hand of execution. Nevertheless, it
distinctly fails to keep the promise of the first act, where, at the
fall of the curtain, the audience has become particularly interested in
a sociological problem, only to be asked in the succeeding acts to
forget it in favor of a conventional treatment of stock melodramatic
material, with the usual thieves, detectives pitted against each other,
and gunplay for the central scene of surprise and capture. That such
current plays as _The City_ and _Within the Law_ can get an unusual
hearing, in spite of these defects, suggests the uncritical nature of
American audiences; but quite as truly implies that drama may be very
good, indeed, in most respects while falling short of the caliber we
demand of masterpieces.
With the opening act, then, so handled as to avoid these pitfalls, the
dramatist is ready to go on with his task. He has sufficiently aroused
the interest of his audience to give it a pleasurable sense of
entertainment ahead, without imparting so much knowledge as to leave too
little for guesswork and lessen the curiosity necessary for one who must
still spend an hour and a half in a place of bad air and too heated
temperature. He has awakened attention and directed it upon a theme and
story, yet left it tantalizingly but not confusingly incomplete. Now he
has before him the problem of unfolding his play and making it center in
the climactic scene which will make or mar the piece. We must observe,
then, how he develops his story in that part of the play intermediate
between the introduction and the crisis; the second act of a three-act
drama or the third if the four-act form be chosen.