DEVELOPMENT
The story being properly started, it becomes the dramatist's business,
as we saw, so to advance it that it will develop naturally and with such
increase of interest as to tighten the hold upon the audience as the
plot reaches its crucial point, the obligatory scene. This can only be
done by the sternest selection of those elements of story which can be
fitly shown on the stage, or without a loss of interest be inferred
clearly from off-stage occurrences. Since action is of the essence of
drama, all narrative must be shunned that deals with matters which,
being vital to the play and naturally dramatic material, can be
presented directly to the eye and ear. And character must be
economically handled, so that as it is revealed the revelation at the
same time furthers the story, pushing it forward instead of holding it
static while the character is being unfolded. Dialogue should always do
one of these two things and the best dialogue will do both: develop plot
in the very moment that it exhibits the unfolding psychology of the
_dramatis personae_. The fact that in the best modern work plot is for
the sake of character rather than the reverse does not violate this
principle; it simply redistributes emphasis. Character without plot may
possibly be attractive in the hands of a Galsworthy or Barker; but the
result is extremely likely to be tame and inconclusive. And,
contrariwise, plot without character, that is, with character that lacks
individuality and meaning and merely offers a peg upon which to hang a
series of happenings, results in primitive drama that, being destitute
of psychology, falls short of the finest and most serious possibilities
of the stage.
This portion of the play, then, intermediate between introduction and
climax, is very important and tries the dramatist's soul, in a way,
quite as truly as do beginning and end.
In a three-act play--which we may assume as normal, without forgetting
that four are often necessary to the best telling of the story, and that
five acts are still found convenient under certain circumstances, as in
Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_ and Shaw's _Pygmalion_--the work of
development falls on the second act, in the main. The climax of action
is likely to be at the end of the act, although plays can be mentioned,
and good ones, where the playwright has seen fit to place his crucial
scene well on into act three. In this matter he is between two dangers
and must steer his course wisely to avoid the rocks of his Scylla and
Charybdis. If his climax come too soon, an effect of anti-climax is
likely to be made, in an act too long when the main stress is over. If,
on the other hand, he put his strongest effect at the end of the piece
or close to it, while the result is admirable in sustaining interest and
saving the best for the last, the close is apt to be too abrupt and
unfinished for the purposes of art; sending the audience out into the
street, dazed after the shock of the obligatory scene.
Therefore, the skillful playwright inclines to leave sufficient of the
play after the climax to make an agreeable rounding out of the fable,
tie up loose ends and secure an artistic effect of completing the whole
structure without tedium or anti-climax. He thus preserves unity, yet
escapes an impression of loose texture in the concluding part of his
play. It may be seen that this makes the final act a very special
problem in itself, a fact we shall consider in the later treatment.
And now, with the second-act portion of the play in mind, standing for
growth, increased tension, and an ever-greater interest, a peculiarity
of the play which differentiates it from the fiction-story can be
mentioned. It refers to the nature of the interest and the attitude of
the auditor toward the story.
In fiction, interest depends largely upon suspense due to the
uncertainty of the happenings; the reader, unaware of the outcome of
events, has a pleasing sense of curiosity and a stimulating desire to
know the end. He reads on, under the prick of this desire. The novelist
keeps him more or less in the dark, and in so doing fans the flame of
interest. What will be the fate of the hero? Will the heroine escape
from the impending doom? Will the two be mated before the Finis is
written? Such are the natural questions in a good novel, in spite of all
our modern overlaying of fiction with subtler psychologic suggestions.
But the stage story is different. The audience from the start is taken
into the dramatist's confidence; it is allowed to know something that is
not known to the _dramatis personae_ themselves; or, at least, not known
to certain very important persons of the story, let us say, the hero and
heroine, to give them the simple old-fashioned description. And the
audience, taken in this flattering way into the playwright's secret,
finds its particular pleasure in seeing how the blind puppets up on the
stage act in an ignorance which if shared by the spectators would
qualify, if not destroy, the special kind of excitement they are
enjoying.
Just why this difference between play and novel exists is a nice
question not so easily answered; that it does exist, nobody who has
thought upon the subject can doubt. Occasionally, it is true, successful
plays are written in apparent violation of this principle. That
eminently skillful and effective piece of theater work, Bernstein's _The
Thief_, is an example; a large part of the whole first act, if not all
of it, takes place without the spectator suspecting that the young wife,
who is the real thief, is implicated in the crime. Nevertheless, such
dramas are the exception. Broadly speaking, sound dramaturgy makes use
of the principle of knowing cooeperation of the audience in the plot, and
always will; if for no other reason, because the direct stage method of
showing a story makes it impracticable to hoodwink those in the
auditorium and also perhaps because the necessary compression of events
in a play would make the suddenness of the discovery on the part of the
audience that they had been fooled unpleasant: an unpleasantness, it may
be surmised, intensified by the additional fact that the fooling has
been done in the presence of others--their fellow theater-goers. The
quickness of the effects possible to the stage and inability of the
playwright to use repetition no doubt also enter in the result. The
novelist can return, explain, dwell upon the causes of the reader's
readjustment to changed characters or surprising turns of circumstance;
the dramatist must go forthright on and make his strokes tell for once
and for all.
Be this as it may, the theater story, as a rule, by a tradition which in
all probability roots in an instinct and a necessity, invites the
listener to be a sort of eavesdropper, to come into a secret and from
this vantage point watch the perturbations of a group of less-knowing
creatures shown behind the footlights: he not only sees, but oversees.
As an outcome of this trait, results follow which also set the play in
contrast with the other ways of story telling. The playwright should not
deceive his audience either in the manipulation of characters or
occurrences. Pleasurable as this may be in fiction, in the theater it is
disastrous. The audience, disturbed in its superior sense of knowledge,
sitting as it were like the gods apart and asked suddenly, peremptorily,
to reconstruct its suppositions, is baffled and then irritated. This is
one of several reasons why, in the delineation of character on the
stage, it is of very dubious desirability to spring a surprise; making
the seeming hero turn out a villain or the presumptive villain blossom
into a paragon of all the virtues: as Dickens does in _Our Mutual
Friend_; in that case, to the added zest of the reader. The risk in
subtilizing stage character lies just here. Persons shown so fleetingly
in a few selected moments of their whole lives, after the stage fashion,
must be seen in high relief, if they are to be clearly grasped by the
onlookers. Conceding that in actual life folk in general are an
indeterminate gray rather than stark black and white, it is none the
less necessary to use primary colors, for the most part, in painting
them, in order that they may be realized. Here again we encounter the
limitations of art in depicting life, and its difference therefrom. In a
certain sense, therefore, stage characters must be more primitive, more
elemental, as well as elementary, than the characters in novels, a
thought we shall have occasion to come back to, from another angle,
later on.
Equally is it true that good technic forbids the false lead: any hint or
suggestion which has the appearance of conducting on to something to
come later in the play, which shall verify and fortify the previous
allusion or implication. Every word spoken is thus, besides its
immediate significance, a preparation for something ahead. It is a
continual temptation to a dramatist with a feeling for character (a gift
most admirable in itself) to do brushwork on some person of his play,
which, while it may illuminate the character as such, may involve
episodic treatment that will entirely mislead an audience into supposing
that the author has far more meaning in the action shown than he
intended. These false leads are of course always the enemies of unity
and to be all the more carefully guarded against in proportion to their
attraction. So attractive, indeed, is this lure into by-paths away from
the main path of progress that it is fairly astonishing to see how
often even veteran playwrights fall in love with some character,
disproportionately handle it, and invent unnecessary tangential
incidents in order to exhibit it. And, rather discouragingly, an
audience forgives episodic treatment and over-emphasis in the enjoyment
of the character, as such; willing to let the drama suffer for the sake
of a welcome detail.
In developing his story in this intermediate part of it, a more
insidious, all-pervasive lure is to be seen in the change in the very
type of drama intended at first, or clearly promised in act one. The
play may start out to be a comedy of character and then be deflected
into one where character is lost sight of in the interest of plot; or a
play farcical in the conditions given may turn serious on the
dramatist's hands. Or, worse yet, that which is a comedy in feeling and
drift, may in the course of the development become tragic in conclusion.
Or, once more, what begins for tragedy, with its implied seriousness of
interest in character and philosophy of life, may resolve itself, under
the fascination of plot and of histrionic effectivism, into melodrama,
with its undue emphasis upon external sensation and its correlative loss
in depth and artistry.
All these and still other permutations a play suffers in the sin
committed whenever the real type or genre of a drama, implied at the
start, is violated in the later handling. The history of the stage
offers many illustrations. In a play not far, everything considered,
from being the greatest in the tongue, Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, it may be
questioned if there be not a departure in the final act from the
emphasis placed upon psychology in the acts that lead up to it. The
character of the melancholy prince is the main thing, the pivot of
interest, up to that point; but in the fifth act the external method of
completing the story, which involves the elimination of so many of the
persons of the play, has somewhat the effect of a change of kind, an
abrupt and incongruous cutting of the Gordian knot. Doubtless, the facts
as to the composite nature of this play viewed in its total history may
have much to do with such an effect, if it be set down here aright.[C]
In any case, it is certain that every week during the dramatic season in
New York new plays are to be seen which, by this mingling of genres,
fall short of the symmetry of true art.
One other requirement in the handling of the play in the section between
introduction and climax: the playwright must not linger too long over
it, nor yet shorten it in his eagerness to reach the scene which is the
crown and culmination of all his labors. Probably the experienced
craftsman is likely to make the second mistake rather than the first,
though both are often to be noted. He fails sometimes to realize the
increase in what I may call reverberatory power which is gained by a
slower approach to the great moment through a series of deft suggestions
of what is to come; appetizing hints and withdrawals, reconnaitres
before the actual engagement, all of it preparatory to the real struggle
that is pending. It is a law of the theater, applying to dialogue,
character and scene, that twice-told is always an advantage. One
distinguished playwright rather cynically declared that you must tell an
audience you are going to do it, are doing it, and have done it.
Examples in every aspect of theater work abound. The catch phrase put in
the mouth of the comic character is only mildly amusing at first; it
gains steadily with repetition until, introduced at just the right
moment, the house rocks with laughter. Often the difference between a
detached witticism, like one of Oscar Wilde's _mots_, and a bit of
genuine dramatic humor rests in the fact that the fun lies in the
setting: it is a _mot de situation_, to borrow the French expression,
not a mere _mot d'esprit_. By appearing to be near a crisis, and then
introducing a barrier from which it is necessary to draw back and
approach once more over the same ground, tension is increased and
tenfold the effect secured when at last the match is laid to the fire.
Plenty of plays fail of their full effect because the climax is come at
before every ounce of value has been wrung out of preceding events. If
the screen scene in _The School for Scandal_ be studied with this
principle in mind, the student will have as good an object lesson as
English drama can show of skilled leading up to a climax by so many
little steps of carefully calculated effect that the final fall of the
screen remains one of the great moments in the theater, despite the
mundane nature of the theme and the limited appeal to the deeper
qualities of human nature. Within its limitations (and theater art, as
any other, is to be judged by success under accepted conditions)
Sheridan's work in this place and play is a permanent master-stroke of
brilliant technic, as well as one explanation of the persistence of that
delightful eighteenth century comedy.
But the dramatist, as I have said, may also err in delaying so long in
his preparation and growth, that the audience, being ready for the
climax before it arrives, will be cold when it comes, and so the effect
will hang fire. It is safe to say that in a three-act play, where the
first act has consumed thirty-five to forty minutes, and the climax is
to occur at the fall of the second curtain, it is well if the
intermediate act does not last much above the same length of time. Of
course, the nature of the story and the demands it makes will modify the
statement; but it applies broadly to the observed phenomena. The first
act, for reasons already explained, is apt to be the longest of the
three, as the last act is the shortest, other things being equal. If the
first act, therefore, run fifty minutes, forty to forty-five, or even
thirty-five, would be shapely for act two; which, with twenty to
twenty-five minutes given to the final act, would allot to the entire
play about two hours and ten minutes, which is close to an ideal playing
time for a drama under modern conditions. This time allowance, with the
added fraction of minutes given to the entr'acts thrown in, would, for a
play which began at 8:15, drop the final curtain at about 10:30.
In case the climax, as has been assumed of a three-act play, be placed
at the end of the second act, the third act will obviously be shorter.
Should, however, the growth be projected into the third act, and the
climax be sprung at a point within this act--beyond the middle, let us
say--then the final act is lengthened and act two shortened in
proportion. The principle is that, with the main interest over, it is
hard to hold the auditor's attention; whereas if the best card is still
up the sleeve we may assume willingness to prolong the game.
With the shift of climax from an earlier to a later place in the piece,
the technic of the handling is changed only according to these
commonsense demands. A knowledge of the psychology of human beings
brought together for the purpose of entertainment will go far toward
settling the question. And whether the playwright place his culminating
effect in act two or three, or whether for good and sufficient reasons
of story complication the three acts become four or even five, the
principles set forth in the above pages apply with only such
modifications as are made necessary by the change.
The theater-goer, seeking to pass an intelligent opinion upon a drama as
a whole, will during this period of growth ask of the playwright that
he keep the auditor's interest and increase it symmetrically; that he
show the plot unfolding in action, instead of talking about it; that he
do not reach the eagerly expected conflagration too soon, nor delay it
too long; and that he make more and more apparent the meaning of the
characters in their relations to each other and to the plot. If the
spectator be confused, baffled, irritated or bored, or any or all of
these, he has a legitimate complaint against the dramatist. And be it
noted that while the majority of a theater audience may not with
self-conscious analysis know why they are dissatisfied, under these
conditions, the dissatisfaction is there, just the same, and thus do
they become critics, though they know it not, even as M. Jourdain talked
prose all his days without being aware of it.