ENDING THE PLAY
To one who is watchful in his theater seat, it must have become evident
that many plays, which in the main give pleasure and seem successful,
have something wrong with the last act. The play-goer may feel this,
although he never has analyzed the cause or more than dimly been aware
of the artistic problem involved. An effect of anti-climax is produced
by it, interest flags or utterly disappears; the final act seems to lag
superfluous on the stage, like Johnson's player.
Several reasons combine to make this no uncommon experience. One may
have emerged from the discussion of the climax. It is the hard fortune
of the last act to follow the great scene and to suffer by contrast;
even if the last part of the play be all that such an act should be,
there is in the nature of the case a likelihood that the auditor,
reacting from his excitement, may find this concluding section of the
drama stale, flat and unprofitable. To overcome this disadvantage, to
make the last act palatable without giving it so much attraction as to
detract from the _scene a faire_ and throw the latter out of its due
position in the center of interest, offers the playwright a very
definite labor and taxes his ingenuity to the utmost. The proof of this
is that so many dramas, up to the final act complete successes and
excellent examples of sound technic, go to pieces here. I am of the
opinion that in no one particular of construction do plays with matter
in them and some right of existence come to grief more frequently than
in this successful handling of the act which closes the drama. It may
even be doubted if the inexperienced dramatist has so much trouble with
his climax as with this final problem. If he had no _scene a faire_ he
would hardly have written a play at all. But this tricky ultimate
portion of the drama, seemingly so minor, may prove that which will
trip him in the full flush of his victory with the obligatory scene.
At first blush, it would seem as if, with the big scene over, little
remained to be done with the play, so far as story is concerned. In a
sense this is true. The important elements are resolved; the main
characters are defined for good or bad; the obstacles which have
combined to make the plot tangle have been removed or proved
insurmountable. The play has, with an increasing sense of struggle,
grown to its height; it must now fall from that height by a plausible
and more gentle descent. If it be a tragedy, the fall spells
catastrophe, and is more abrupt and eye-compelling. If comedy be the
form, then the unknotting means a happy solution of all difficulties.
But in either case, the chief business of this final part of the play
would appear to be the rounding out of the fable, the smoothing off of
corners, and the production of an artistic effect of finish and
finality. If any part of the story be incomplete in plot, it will be in
all probability that which has to do with the subplot, if there be one,
or with the fates of subsidiary characters. If the playwright, wishing
to make his last act of interest, and in order to justify the retention
of the audience in the theater for twenty minutes to half an hour more,
should leave somewhat of the main story to be cleared up in the last
act, he has probably weakened his obligatory scene and made a strategic
mistake. And so his instinct is generally right when he prefers to get
all possible dramatic satisfaction into the _scene a faire_, even at the
expense of what is to follow.
A number of things this act can, however, accomplish. It can, with the
chief stress and strain over, exhibit characters in whom the audience
has come to have a warm interest in some further pleasant manifestation
of their personality, thus offering incidental entertainment. The
interest in such stage persons must be very strong to make this a
sufficient reason for prolonging a play. Or, if the drama be tragic in
its nature, some lighter turn of events, or some brighter display of
psychology, may be presented to mitigate pain and soften the awe and
terror inspired by the main theme; as, for instance, Shakespeare
alleviates the deaths of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet by the
reconciliation of the estranged families over their fair young bodies. A
better mood for leaving the playhouse is thus created, without any lying
about life. The Greeks did this by the use of lyric song at the end of
their tragedies; melodrama does it by an often violent wresting of
events to smooth out the trouble, as well as by lessening our interest
in character as such.
Also, and here is, I believe, its prime function, the last act can show
the logical outflow of the situation already laid down and brought to
its issue in the preceding acts of the drama. Another danger lurks in
this for the technician, as may be shown. It would almost seem that, in
view of the largely supererogatory character of this final act, inasmuch
as the play seems practically over with the _scene a faire_, it might be
best honestly to end the piece with its most exciting, arresting scene
and cut out the final half hour altogether.
But there is an artistic reason for keeping it as a feature of good
play-making to the end of the years; I have just referred to it. I mean
the instinctive desire on the part of the dramatic artist and his
cooeperative auditors so to handle the cross-section of life which has
been exhibited upon the stage as to make the transition from stage scene
to real life so gradual, so plausible, as to be pleasant to one's sense
of esthetic _vraisemblance_. To see how true this is, watch the effect
upon yourself made by a play which rings down the last curtain upon a
sensational moment, leaving you dazed and dumb as the lights go up and
the orchestra renders its final banality. Somehow, you feel that this
sudden, violent change from life fictive and imaginative to the life
actual of garish streets, clanging trolleys, tooting motor cars and
theater suppers is jarring and wrong. Art, you whisper to yourself,
should not be so completely at variance with life; the good artist
should find some other better way to dismiss you. The Greeks, as I said,
sensitive to this demand, mitigated the terrible happenings of their
colossal legendary tragedies by closing with lofty lyric choruses. Turn
to the last pages of Sophocles's _OEdipus Tyrannus_, perhaps the most
drastic of them all, for an example. I should venture to go so far as to
suggest it as possible that in an apparent exception like _Othello_,
where the drama closes harshly upon the murder of the ewe lamb of a
wife, Shakespeare might have introduced the alleviation of a final
scene, had he ever prepared this play, or his plays in general, after
the modern method of revision and final form, for the Argus-eyed
scrutiny they were to receive in after-time. However, that his instinct
in this matter, in general, led him to seek the artistic consolation
which removes the spectator from too close and unrelieved proximity to
the horrible is beyond cavil. If he do furnish a tragic scene, there
goes with it a passage, a strain of music, an unforgettable phrase,
which, beauty being its own excuse for being, is as balm to the soul
harrowed up by the agony of a protagonist. Horatio, over the body of his
dear friend, speaks words so lovely that they seem the one rubric for
sorrow since. And, still further removing us from the solemn sadness of
the moment, enters Fortinbras, to take over the cares of kingdom and, in
so doing, to remind us that beyond the individual fate of Hamlet lies
the great outer world of which, after all, he is but a small part; and
that the ordered cosmos must go on, though the Ophelias and Hamlets of
the world die. The mere horrible, with this alleviation of beauty,
becomes a very different thing, the terrible; the terrible is the
horrible, plus beauty, and the terrible lifts us to a lofty mood of
searching seriousness that has its pleasure, where the horrible repels
and dispirits. Thus, the sympathetic recipient gets a certain austere
satisfaction, yes, why not call it pleasure, from noble tragedy. But he
asks that the last act pour the oil of peace, of beauty and of
philosophic vision upon the troubled waters of life.
There is then an artistic justification, if I am right, for the act
following the climax, quite aside from the conventional demand for it as
a time filler, and its convenience too in the way of binding up loose
ends.
As the function of the great scene is to develop and bring to a head
the principal things of the play, so that of this final act would seem
to be the taking care of the lesser things, to an effect of harmonious
artistry. And whenever a playwright, confronting these difficulties and
dangers, triumphs over them, whenever your comment is to the effect
that, since it all appears to be over, it is hard to see what a last act
can offer to justify it, and yet if that act prove interesting, freshly
invented, unexpectedly worth while, you will, if you care to do your
part in the Triple Alliance made up of actors, playwright and audience,
express a sentiment of gratitude, and admiration as well, for the
theater artist who has manipulated his material to such good result.
The last act of Thomas's _The Witching Hour_ can be studied with much
profit with this in mind. It is a masterly example of added interest
when the things vital to the story have been taken care of. Another, and
very different, example is Louis Parker's charming play, _Rosemary_,
where at the climax a middle-aged man parts from the young girl who
loves him and whom he loves, because he does not realize she returns
the feeling, and, moreover, she is engaged to another, and, from the
conventions of age, the match is not desirable. The story is over,
surely, and it is a sad ending; nothing can ever change that, unless the
dramatist tells some awful lies about life. Had he violently twisted the
drama into a "pleasant ending" in the last act he would have given us an
example of an outrageous disturbance of key and ruined his piece. What
does he do, indeed, what can he do? By a bold stroke of the imagination,
he projects the final scene fifty years forward, and shows the man of
forty an old man of ninety. He learns, by the finding of the girl's
diary, that she loved him; and, as the curtain descends, he thanks God
for a beautiful memory. Time has plucked out the sting and left only the
flower-like fragrance. This is a fine illustration of an addendum that
is congruous. It lifts the play to a higher category. I believe it is
true to say that this unusual last act was the work of Mr. Murray
Carson, Mr. Parker's collaborator in the play.
One more example may be given, for these illustrations will bring out
more clearly a phase of dramatic writing which has not received overmuch
attention in criticism. The recent clever comedy, _Years of Discretion_,
by the Hattons, conducts the story to a conventional end, when the
middle-aged lovers, who have flirted, danced and motored themselves into
an engagement and marriage, are on the eve of their wedding tour. If the
story be a love story, and it is in essence, it ought to be over. The
staid Boston widow has been metamorphosed by gay New York, her maneuvers
have resulted in the traditional end; she has got her man. What else can
be offered to hold the interest?
And just here is where the authors have been able, passing beyond the
conventional limits of story, to introduce, in a lightly touched,
pleasing fashion, a bit of philosophy that underlies the drama and gives
it an enjoyable fillip at the close. We see the newly wed pair, facing
that wedding tour at fifty, and secretly longing to give it up and
settle down comfortably at home. They have been playing young during
the New York whirl, why not be natural now and enjoy life in the decade
to which they belong? So, in the charming garden scene they confess, and
agree to grow old gracefully together. It is excellent comedy and sound
psychology; to some, the last act is the best of all. Yet, regarded from
the act preceding, it seemed superfluous.
Still another trouble confronts the playwright as he comes at grapples
with the final act. He falls under the temptation to make a
conventionally desirable conclusion, the "pleasant ending" already
animadverted against, which is supposed to be the constant petition of
the theater Philistine. Here, it will be observed, the pleasant ending
becomes part of the constructive problem. Shall the playwright carry out
the story in a way to make it harmonious with what has gone before, both
psychologically and in the logic of events? Shall he make the conclusion
congruous with the climax, a properly deduced result from the situation
therein shown? If he do, his play will be a work of art, tonal in a
totality whose respective parts are keyed to this effect. Or shall he,
adopting the tag line familiar to us in fairy tales, "and so they lived
happily ever after," wrest and distort his material in order to give
this supposed-to-be-prayed-for condiment that the grown-up babes in
front are crying for? Every dramatist meets this question face to face
in his last act, unless his plan has been to throw his most dramatic
moment at the play's very end. A large percentage of all dramas weaken
or spoil the effect by this handling of the last part of the play. The
ending either is ineffective because unbelievable; or unnecessary,
because what it shows had better be left to the imagination.
An attractive and deservedly successful drama by Mr. Zangwill, _Merely
Mary Ann_, may be cited to illustrate the first mistake. Up to the last
act its handling of the relation of the gentleman lodger and the quaint
little slavey is pitched in the key of truth and has a Dickens-like
sympathy in it which is the main element in its charm. But in the final
scene, where Mary Ann has become a fashionable young woman, meets her
whilom man friend, and a match results, the improbability is such (to
say nothing about the impossibility) as to destroy the previous illusion
of reality; the auditor, if intelligent, feels that he has paid too high
a price for such a union. I am not arguing that the improbable may not
be legitimate on the stage; but only trying to point out that, in this
particular case, the key of the play, established in previous acts, is
the key of probability; and hence the change is a sin against artistic
probity. The key of improbability, as in some excellent farces, _Baby
Mine_, _Seven Days_, _Seven Keys to Baldpate_, and their kind--where it
is basal that we grant certain conditions or happenings not at all
likely in life--is quite another matter and not of necessity
reprehensible in the least. But _Merely Mary Ann_ is too true in its
homely fashion to fob us off with lies at the end; we believed it at
first and so are shocked at its mendacity.
One of the best melodramas of recent years is Mr. McLellan's _Leah
Kleschna_. Its psychology, founded on the assumption that a woman whose
higher nature is appealed to, will respond to the appeal, is as sound as
it is fine and encouraging. She is a criminal who is caught opening a
safe by the French statesman whose house she has entered. His
conversation with her is so effective that she breaks with her fellow
thieves and starts in on another and better life in a foreign country,
where the statesman secures for her honest employment.
It is in the last act that the playwright gets into trouble, and
illustrates the second possibility just mentioned; unnecessary
information which can readily be filled in by the spectator, without the
addition of a superfluous act to show it. The woman has broken with her
gang, she is saved; arrangement has been made for her to go to Austria
(if my memory locates the land), there to work out her change of heart.
Really, there is nothing else to tell. The essential interest of the
play lay in the reclaiming of Leah; she is reclaimed! Why not dismiss
the audience? But the author, perhaps led astray by the principle of
showing things on the stage, even if the things shown lie beyond the
limits of the story proper, exhibits the girl in her new quarters, aided
and abetted by the scene painter who places behind her a very expensive
background of Nature; and then caps his unnecessary work by bringing the
statesman on a visit to see how his protegee is getting along.
Meanwhile, the knowing spectator murmurs in his seat (let us hope) and
kicks against the pricks of convention.
These examples indicate some of the problems centering in an act which
for the very reason that it is, or seems, comparatively unimportant, is
all the more likely to trip up a dramatist who, buoyed up by his victory
in a fine and effective scene of climactic force, comes to the final act
in a state of reaction, and forgetful of the fact that pride goeth
before a fall--the fall of the curtain! No wonder that, in order to
dodge all such difficulties, playwrights sometimes project their climax
forward into the last act and so shorten what is left to do thereafter;
or, going further, place it at the play's terminal point. But the
artistic objections to this have been explained. Some treatment of the
falling action after the climax, longer or shorter, is advisable; and
the dramatist must sharpen his wits upon this technical demand and make
it part of the satisfaction of his art to meet it.
The fundamental business of the last act of a play, let it be repeated,
is to show the general results of a situation presented in the crucial
scene, in so far as those results are pertinent to a satisfactory grasp
of story and idea on the part of the auditor. These results must be in
harmony with the beginning, growth and crisis of the story and must
either be demanded in advance by the audience, or gladly received as
pleasant and helpful, when presented. The citation of such plays as
_Rosemary_ and _Years of Discretion_ raises the interesting question
whether a peculiar function of the final act may not lie in not only
rounding out the story as such, but in bringing home the underlying idea
of the piece to the audience. Surely a rich opportunity, as yet but
little utilized, is here. Yet again danger lurks in the opportunity.
The last act might take on the nature of a philosophic tag, a
preachment not organically related to the preceding parts. This, of
course, would be a sad misuse of the chance to give the drama a wider
application and finer bloom. But if the playwright have the skill and
inventive power to merge the two elements of story and idea in a final
act which adds stimulating material while it brings out clearly the
underlying theme, then he will have performed a kind of double function
of the drama. In the new technic of to-day and to-morrow this may come
to be, more and more, the accepted aim of the resourceful, thoughtful
maker of plays.
The intelligent auditor in the playhouse with this aspect of technic
before him will be able to assist in his cooeperation with worthy plays
by noticing particularly if the closing treatment of the material in
hand seem germane to the subject; if it avoid anti-climax and keep the
key; and if it demonstrates skill in overcoming such obstacles as have
been indicated. Such a play-goer will not slight the final act as of
only technical importance, but will be alertly on the watch to see if
his friend the playwright successfully grapples with the last of the
successive problems which arise during the complex and very difficult
business of telling a stage story with clearness, effectiveness and
charm.