As the final curtain falls upon the majority of the plays that somehow get
themselves presented in the theatres of New York, the critical observer
feels tempted to ask the playwright that simple question of young Peterkin
in Robert Southey's ballad, _After Blenheim_,--"Now tell us what 't was all
about"; and he suffers an uncomfortable feeling that the playwright will be
obliged to answer in the words of old Kaspar, "Why, that I cannot tell."
The critic has viewed a semblance of a dramatic struggle between puppets on
the stage; but what they fought each other for he cannot well make out. And
it is evident, in the majority of cases, that the playwright could not tell
him if he would, for the reason that the playwright does not know. Not even
the author can know what a play is all about when the play isn't about
anything. And this, it must be admitted, is precisely what is wrong with
the majority of the plays that are shown in our theatres, especially with
plays written by American authors. They are not about anything; or, to say
the matter more technically, they haven't any theme.
By a theme is meant some eternal principle, or truth, of human life--such a
truth as might be stated by a man of philosophic mind in an abstract and
general proposition--which the dramatist contrives to convey to his
auditors concretely by embodying it in the particular details of his play.
These details must be so selected as to represent at every point some phase
of the central and informing truth, and no incidents or characters must be
shown which are not directly or indirectly representative of the one thing
which, in that particular piece, the author has to say. The great plays of
the world have all grown endogenously from a single, central idea; or, to
vary the figure, they have been spun like spider-webs, filament after
filament, out of a central living source. But most of our native
playwrights seem seldom to experience this necessary process of the
imagination which creates. Instead of working from the inside out, they
work from the outside in. They gather up a haphazard handful of theatric
situations and try to string them together into a story; they congregate an
ill-assorted company of characters and try to achieve a play by letting
them talk to each other. Many of our playwrights are endowed with a sense
of situation; several of them have a gift for characterisation, or at least
for caricature; and most of them can write easy and natural dialogue,
especially in slang. But very few of them start out with something to say,
as Mr. Moody started out in _The Great Divide_ and Mr. Thomas in _The
Witching Hour_.
When a play is really about something, it is always possible for the critic
to state the theme of it in a single sentence. Thus, the theme of _The
Witching Hour_ is that every thought is in itself an act, and that
therefore thinking has the virtue, and to some extent the power, of action.
Every character in the piece was invented to embody some phase of this
central proposition, and every incident was devised to represent this
abstract truth concretely. Similarly, it would be easy to state in a single
sentence the theme of _Le Tartufe_, or of _Othello_, or of _Ghosts_. But
who, after seeing four out of five of the American plays that are produced
upon Broadway, could possibly tell in a single sentence what they were
about? What, for instance--to mention only plays which did not fail--was
_Via Wireless_ about, or _The Fighting Hope_, or even _The Man from Home_?
Each of these was in some ways an interesting entertainment; but each was
valueless as drama, because none of them conveyed to its auditors a theme
which they might remember and weave into the texture of their lives.
For the only sort of play that permits itself to be remembered is a play
that presents a distinct theme to the mind of the observer. It is ten years
since I have seen _Le Tartufe_ and six years since last I read it; and yet,
since the theme is unforgetable, I could at any moment easily reconstruct
the piece by retrospective imagination and summarise the action clearly in
a paragraph. But on the other hand, I should at any time find it impossible
to recall with sufficient clearness to summarise them, any of a dozen
American plays of the usual type which I had seen within the preceding six
months. Details of incident or of character or of dialogue slip the mind
and melt away like smoke into the air. To have seen a play without a theme
is the same, a month or two later, as not to have seen a play at all. But a
piece like _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, once seen, can never be forgotten;
because the mind clings to the central proposition which the play was built
in order to reveal, and from this ineradicable recollection may at any
moment proceed by psychologic association to recall the salient concrete
features of the action. To develop a play from a central theme is therefore
the sole means by which a dramatist may insure his work against the
iniquity of oblivion. In order that people may afterward remember what he
has said, it is necessary for him to show them clearly and emphatically at
the outset why he has undertaken to talk and precisely what he means to
talk about.
Most of our American playwrights, like Juliet in the balcony scene, speak,
yet they say nothing. They represent facts, but fail to reveal truths. What
they lack is purpose. They collect, instead of meditating; they invent,
instead of wondering; they are clever, instead of being real. They are avid
of details: they regard the part as greater than the whole. They deal with
outsides and surfaces, not with centralities and profundities. They value
acts more than they value the meanings of acts; they forget that it is in
the motive rather than in the deed that Life is to be looked for. For Life
is a matter of thinking and of feeling; all act is merely Living, and is
significant only in so far as it reveals the Life that prompted it. Give us
less of Living, more of Life, must ever be the cry of earnest criticism.
Enough of these mutitudinous, multifarious facts: tell us single, simple
truths. Give us more themes, and fewer fabrics of shreds and patches.