Writing for Vaudeville Part 18

[3] The long play Way Down East is a fine example of the pastoral--or rural--drama of American life.

And also of

_The Detective Drama_: [4] The form of drama dealing with the detection of crime and the apprehension of the criminal. I cannot recollect a detective playlet--or three-act play, for that matter--that is not melodramatic. When the action is not purely melodramatic, the lines and the feeling usually thrill with melodrama. [5] "The System," which is a playlet dealing with the detection of detectives, is but one example in point.

[4] Mr. Charlton Andrews makes a series of interesting and helpful discriminations among the several dramatic forms, in his work The Technique of Play Writing, published uniform with this volume in "The Writer's Library."

[5] Sherlock Holmes, William Gillette's masterly dramatization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective stories, is melodramatic even when the action is most restrained.

Here, then, we have the four great kinds of playlet, and four out of the many variations that often seem to the casual glance to possess elemental individuality.

Remember that this chapter is merely one of definitions and that a definition is a description of something given to it after--not before--it is finished. A definition is a tag, like the label the entomologist ties to the pin after he has the b.u.t.terfly nicely dead. Of questionable profit it would be to you, struggling to waken your playlet into life, to worry about a definition that might read "Here Lies a Polite Comedy."

Professor Baker says that the tragedies of Shakespere may have seemed to the audiences of their own day "not tragedies at all, but merely more masterly specimens of dramatic story-telling than the things that preceded them." [1] If Shakespere did not worry about the precise labels of the plays he was busy writing and producing, you and I need not. Forget definitions--forget everything but your playlet and the grip, the thrill, the punch, the laughter of your plot.

[1] Development of Shakespere as a Dramatist, by Prof. Baker of Harvard University.

To sum up: The limits of the playlet are narrow, its requirements are exacting, but within those limits and those requirements you may picture anything you possess the power to present. Pick out from life some incident, character, temperament--whatever you will--and flash upon it the glare of the vaudeville spot-light; breathe into it the breath of life; show its every aspect and effect; dissect away the needless; vivify the series of actions you have chosen for your brief and trenchant crisis; lift it all with laughter or touch it all with tears. Like a searchlight your playlet must flash over the landscape of human hearts and rest upon some phase of pa.s.sion, some momentous incident, and make it stand out clear and real from the darkness of doubt that surrounds it.

CHAPTER XII

HOW PLAYLETS ARE GERMINATED

Where does a playlet writer get his idea? How does he recognize a playlet idea when it presents itself to him? How much of the playlet is achieved when he hits on the idea? These questions are asked successful playlet writers every day, but before we proceed to find their answers, we must have a paragraph or two of definition.

I. THE THEME-PROBLEM AND ITS RANGE

Whenever the word "problem" is used--as, "the problem of a playlet"--I do not mean it in the sense that one gathers when he hears the words "problem play"; nothing whatever of s.e.x or the other problems of the day is meant. What I mean is grasped at first glance better, perhaps, by the word "theme." Yet "theme" does not convey the precise thought I wish to a.s.sociate with the idea.

A theme is a subject--that much I wish to convey--but I choose "problem" because I wish to connote the fact that the theme of a playlet is more than a subject: it is precisely what a problem in mathematics is. Given a problem in geometry, you must solve it--from its first statement all the way through to the "Q.E.D."

Each step must bear a plain and logical relation to that which went before and what follows. Your playlet theme is your problem, and you must choose for a theme or subject only such a problem as can be "proved" conclusively within the limits of a playlet.

Naturally, you are inclined to inquire as a premise to the questions that open this chapter, What are the themes or subjects that offer themselves as best suited to playlet requirements? In other words, what make the best playlet problems? Here are a few that present themselves from memory of playlets that have achieved exceptional success:

A father may object to his son's marrying anyone other than the girl whom he has chosen for him, but be won over by a little baby--"d.i.n.kelspiel's Christmas," by George V. Hobart.

A slightly intoxicated young man may get into the wrong house by mistake and come through all his adventures triumphantly to remain a welcome guest--"In and Out," by Porter Emerson Brown.

A "crooked" policeman may build up a "system," but the honest policemen will hunt him down, even letting the lesser criminal escape to catch the greater--"The System," by Taylor Granville, Junie MacCree and Edward Clark.

Youth that lies in the mind and not in the body or dress may make a grandmother act and seem younger than her granddaughter--"Youth,"

by Edgar Allan Woolf.

A foolish young woman may leave her husband because she has "found him out," yet return to him again when she discovers that another man is no better than he is--"The Lollard," by Edgar Allan Woolf.

A man may do away with another, but escape the penalty because of the flawless method of the killing--"Blackmail," by Richard Harding Davis.

A wide range of themes is shown in even these few playlets, isn't there? Yet the actual range of themes from which playlet problems may be chosen is not even suggested. Though I stated the problems of all the playlets that were ever presented in vaudeville, the field of playlet-problem possibilities would not be even adequately suggested. Anything, everything, presents itself for a playlet problem--if you can make it human, interesting and alive.

What interests men and women? Everything, you answer. Whatever interests you and your family, and your neighbor and his family, and the man across the street and his wife's folks back home--is a subject for a playlet. Whatever causes you to stop and think, to laugh or cry, is a playlet problem. "Art is life seen through a personality," is as true of the playlet as of any other art form.

Because some certain subject or theme has never been treated in a playlet, does not mean that it cannot be. It simply means that that particular subject has never yet appealed to a man able to present it successfully. Vaudeville is hungering for writers able to make gripping playlets out of themes that never have been treated well. To such it offers its largest rewards. What do you know better than anyone else--what do you feel keener than anyone else does--what can you present better than anyone else? That is the subject you should choose for _your_ playlet problem.

And so you see that a playlet problem is not merely just "an idea"; it is a subject that appeals to a writer as offering itself with peculiar credentials--as the theme that he should select. It is anything at all--anything that you can make _your own_ by your mastery of its every angle.

1. What Themes to Avoid

(a) _Unfamiliar Themes_. If a subject of which you have not a familiar knowledge presents itself to you, reject it. Imagine how a producer, the actors and an audience--if they let the thing go that far--would laugh at a playlet whose premises were false and whose incidents were silly, because untrue. Never give anyone an opportunity to look up from a ma.n.u.script of yours and grin, as he says: "This person's a fool; he doesn't know what he's writing about."

(b) _"Cause" Themes_. Although more powerful than the "stump" or the pulpit today, and but little less forceful than the newspaper as a means of exposing intolerable conditions and ushering in new and better knowledge, the stage is not the place for propaganda.

The public goes to the theatre to be entertained, not instructed--particularly is this true of vaudeville--and the writer daring enough to attempt to administer even homeopathic doses of instruction, must be a master-hand to win. Once in a generation a Shaw may rise, who, by a twist of his pen, can make the public think, while he wears a guileful smile as he propounds philosophy from under a jester's cap; but even then his plays must be edited--as some of Shaw's are--of all but the most dramatic of his belligerently impudent notions.

If you have a religious belief, a political creed, a racial propagandum--in short, a "cause"--either to defend or to forward, don't write it in a drama. The legitimate stage might be induced to present it, if someone were willing to pay the theatre's losses, but vaudeville does not want it. Choose any form of presentation--a newspaper article, a magazine story, anything at all--save a playlet for polemic or "cause" themes.

(c) _Hackneyed Themes_. What has been "done to death" in vaudeville?

You know as well as the most experienced playlet-writer, if you will only give the subject unbiased thought. What are the things that make you squirm in your seat and the man next you reach for his hat and go out? A list would fill a page, but there are two that should be mentioned because so many playlets built upon them are now being offered to producers without any hope of acceptance.

There is the "mistaken ident.i.ty" theme, in which the entire action hinges on one character's mistaking another for someone else--one word spoken in time would make the entire action needless, but the word is never spoken--or there would be no playlet. And the "henpecked husband," or the mistreated wife, who gets back at the final curtain, is a second. Twenty years hence either one of these may be the theme of the "scream" of the season, for stage fas.h.i.+ons change like women's styles, but, if you wish your playlet produced today, don't employ them.

(d) _Improper Themes_. Any theme that would bring a blush to the cheek of your sister, of your wife, of your daughter, you must avoid. No matter how pure your motive might be in making use of such a theme, resolutely deny it when it presents itself to you.

The fact that the young society girl who offered me a playlet based on, to her, an amazing experience down at the Women's Night Court--where she saw the women of the streets brought before the judge and their "men" paying the fines--was a clean-minded, big-hearted girl anxious to help better conditions, did not make her theme any cleaner or her playlet any better.

Of course, I do not mean that you must ignore such conditions when your playlet calls for the use of such characters. I mean that you should not base your playlet entirely on such themes--you should never make such a theme the chief reason of your playlet's being.

2. What Themes to Use

You may treat any subject or play upon any theme, whatsoever it may be, provided it is not a "cause," is not hackneyed, is not improper for its own sake and likely to bring a blush to the cheeks of those you love, _is_ familiar to you in its every angle, and is a subject that forms a problem which can be proved conclusively within the requirements of a playlet.

II. WHERE PLAYLET WRITERS GET THEIR IDEAS

1. The Three Forms of Dramatic Treatment

It is generally accepted by students of the novel and the short-story that there are three ways of constructing a narrative:

(a) Characters may be fitted with a story.

(b) A sequence of events may be fitted with characters.

(c) An interesting atmosphere may be expressed by characters and a sequence of events.

In other words, a narrative may be told by making either the characters or the events or the atmosphere peculiarly and particularly prominent.

It should be obvious that the special character of vaudeville makes the last-named--the story of atmosphere--the least effective; indeed, as drama is action--by which I mean a clash of wills and the outcome--no audience would be likely to sit through even twenty minutes of something which, after all, merely results in a "feeling." Therefore the very nature of the pure story of atmosphere eliminates it from the stage; next in weakness of effect is the story of character; while the strongest--blood of its blood and bone of its bone--is the story of dramatic events. This is for what the stage is made and by which it lives. To be sure, character and atmosphere both have their places in the play of dramatic action, but for vaudeville those places must be subordinate.

These last two ways of constructing a story will be taken up and discussed in detail later on, in their proper order; they are mentioned here to help make clear how a playwright gets an idea.