Writing for Vaudeville Part 23

The climax of "Blackmail" seems to come when Fallon shoots Mohun and Kelly breaks into the room--to the curtain it is _seven speeches_. But the real climax is reached when Kelly shouts over the telephone "Of course, in self-defense, you fool, _of course_, in self-defense." This is--_the last speech_.

Convincing evidence, is this not, of the speed with which the curtain must follow the climax?

And so we have come, to this most important point--the "finish"

or "the curtain," as vaudeville calls it. The very last thing that must be shown, and the final word that must be said before the curtain comes down, are the last loose ends of the plot which must be spliced into place--the final illuminating word to round out the whole playlet humanly and cleverly. "The Lollard" goes back to Miss Carey's sleep, which Angela's knock on the door interrupted: "Now, thank Gawd, I'll get a little sleep," says Miss Carey as she puts out the light. A human, an everyday word it is, spoken like a reminiscent thrill--and down comes the curtain amid laughter and applause. A fine way to end.

But not the only way--let us examine "The System."

"Well, we're broke again," says Goldie tearfully. "We can't go West now, so there's no use packing." Now, note the use of business in the ending, and the surprise. The Eel goes stealthily to the window L, looks out, and pulls the dictograph from the wall. Then he comes down stage to Goldie who is sitting on the trunk and has watched him. He taps her on the shoulder, taking Dugan's red wallet out of his pocket. "Go right ahead and pack," says The Eel, while Goldie looks astonished and begins to laugh. The audience, too, look astonished and begin to laugh when they see that red wallet. It is a surprise--a surprise so cleverly constructed that it hits the audience hard just above the laughter-and-applause-belt-- a surprise that made the act at least twenty-five per cent better than it would have been without it. And from it we may now draw the "rules" for the use of that most helpful and most dangerous element, surprise in the vaudeville finish:

Note first, that it was entirely logical for The Eel to steal the wallet--he is a pickpocket. Second, that the theft of the wallet is not of trivial importance to Goldie's destiny and to his--they are "broke" and they must get away; the money solves all their problems. And third, note that while The Eel's possession of the wallet is a surprise, the wallet itself is _not_ a surprise--it has first played a most important part in the tempting of Goldie and has been shown to the audience not once but many times; and its very color--red--makes it instantly recognizable; the spectators know what it contains and what its contents mean to the destinies of both The Eel and Goldie--it is only that The Eel has it, that const.i.tutes the surprise.

Now I must sound a warning against striving too hard after a surprise finish. The very nature of many playlets makes it impossible to give them such a curtain. If you have built up a story which touches the heart and brings tears to the eyes, and then turn it all into a joke, the chances are the audience will feel that their sympathies have been outraged, and so the playlet will fail. For instance, one playlet was ruined because right on top of the big, absorbing climax two of the characters who were then off stage stuck their heads in at the door and shouted at the hero of the tense situation, "April Fool."

Therefore, the following may be considered as an important "rule"; a playlet that touches the heart should never end with a trick or a surprise. [1]

[1] See Chapter XVIII, section III, par. 4.

Now, let me sum up these four elements of surprise:

A surprise finish must be fitting, logical, vitally important, and revealingly dramatic; if you cannot give a playlet a surprise-finish that shall be all of these four things at once, be content with the simpler ending.

The importance of a playlet's ending is so well understood in vaudeville that the insistence upon a "great finish" to every playlet has sometimes seemed to be over-insistence, for, important as it is, it is no more important than a "great opening" and "great scenes." The ending is, of course, the final thing that quickens applause, and, coming last and being freshest in the mind of the audience, it is more likely to carry just a fair act to success than a fine act is likely to win with the handicap of a poor finish.

But, discounting this to be a bit under the current valuation of "great finishes," we still may round out this discussion of the playlet's three important parts, with this temperate sentence:

A well constructed playlet plot is one whose Beginning states the premises of its problem clearly and simply, whose Middle develops the problem logically and solves the entanglement in a "big" scene, and whose Ending rounds out the whole satisfyingly-- with a surprise, if fitting.

But, temperate and helpful as this statement of a well constructed plot may be, there is something lacking in it. And that something lacking is the very highest test of plot--lightly touched on at various times, but which, although it enters into a playwright's calculations every step of the way, could not be logically considered in this treatise until the structure had been examined as a whole: I mean the formidable-sounding, but really very simple dramatic unities.

III. THE THREE DRAMATIC UNITIES

Now, but only for a moment, we must return to the straight line of investigation from which we swerved in considering the structural parts of a playlet plot.

At the beginning of this chapter we saw that a simple narrative of events is made a plot by the addition of a crisis or entanglement, and its resolution or untying. Now, the point I wish to present with all the emphasis at my command, is that complication does not mean complexity.

1. Unity of Action

In other words, no matter how many events you place one after another--no matter how you pile incident upon incident--you will not have a plot unless you so _inter-relate_ them that the removal of anyone event will destroy the whole story. Each event must depend on the one preceding it, and in turn form a basis for the one following, and each must depend upon all the others so vitally that if you take one away the whole collapses. [1]

[1] See Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter VIII, and also Poe's criticism, The American Drama.

(a) _Unity of Hero is not Unity of Action._ One of the great errors into which the novice is likely to fall, is to believe that because he makes every event which happens happen to the hero, he is observing the rule of unity. Nothing could be farther from the truth--nothing is so detrimental to successful plot construction.

[2]

[2] See Freytag's Technique of the Drama, p. 36.

Aristotle tried to correct this evil, which he saw in the plays of the great Athenian poets, by saying: "The action is the first and most important thing, the characters only second;" and, "The action is not given unity by being made to concern only one person."

Remember, unity of action means unity of _story_.

(b) _Double-Action is Dangerous to Unity_. If you have a scene in which two minor characters come together for a reason vital to the plot, you must be extremely careful not to tell anything more than the facts that are vital. In long plays the use of what is called "double-action "--that is, giving to characters necessary to the plot an interest and a destiny separate from that of the chief characters--is, of course, recognized and productive of fine results. But, even in the five-act play, the use of double-action is dangerous. For instance: Shakespere developed Falstaff so humorously that today we sometimes carelessly think of "Henry IV"

as a delightful comedy, when in reality it was designed as a serious drama--and is most serious, when Falstaff's lines are cut from the reading version to the right proportions for to-day's stage effect.

If Shakespere nodded, it is a nod even the legitimate dramatist of today should take to heart, and the playlet writer--peculiarly restricted as to time--must engrave deeply in his memory.

The only way to secure unity of action is to concentrate upon your problem or theme; to realize that you are telling a _story_; to remember that each character, even your hero, is only a p.a.w.n to advance the story; and to cut away rigorously all non-essential events. If you will bear in mind that a playlet is only as good as its plot, that a plot is a _story_ and that you must give to your story, as has been said, "A completeness--a kind of universal dovetailedness, a sort of general oneness," you will have little difficulty in observing the one playlet rule that should never be broken--Unity of action.

2. Unity of Time

The second of the cla.s.sical unities, unity of time, is peculiarly perplexing, if you study to "understand" and not merely to write.

Briefly--for I must reiterate that our purpose is practice and not theory--the dramatists of every age since Aristotle have quarreled over the never-to-be-settled problem of what s.p.a.ce of time a play should be permitted to represent. Those who take the stand that no play should be allowed to show an action that would require more than twenty-four hours for the occurrences in real life, base their premise on the imitative quality of the stage, rather than upon the selective quality of art. While those who contend that a play may disregard the cla.s.sical unity of time, if only it preserves the unity of action, base their contention upon the fact that an audience is interested not in time at all--but in story.

In other words, a play preserves the only unity worth preserving when it deals with the incidents that cause a crisis and ends by showing its effect, no matter whether the action takes story-years to occur or happens all in a story-hour.

If we were studying the long drama it might be worth our while to consider the various angles of this ancient dispute, but, fortunately, we have a practical and, therefore, better standard by which to state this unity in its application to the playlet. Let us approach the matter in this way:

Vaudeville is variety--it strives to compress into the s.p.a.ce of about two hours and a half a great number of different acts which run the gamut of the entertainment forms, and therefore it cannot afford more than an average of twenty minutes to each. This time limit makes it difficult for a playlet to present effectively any story that does not occur in consecutive minutes. It has been found that even the lowering of the curtain for one second to denote the lapse of an hour or a year, has a tendency to distract the minds of the audience from the story and to weaken the singleness of effect without which a playlet is nothing.

On the other hand, this "rule" is not unbreakable: a master craftsman's genius is above all laws. In "The System" the first scene takes place in the evening; scene two, a little later the same evening; and scene three later that same night. The story is really continuous in time, but the story-time is not equal to the playing-time even though this playlet consumes nearly twice twenty minutes. But, you will note, the scenery changes help to keep the interest of the audience from flagging, and also stamp the lapses of time effectively.

A still greater violation of the "rule"--if it were stated as absolutely rigid--is to be found in Mr. Granville's later act, "The Yellow Streak," written in collaboration with James Madison.

Here scene two takes place later in the evening of the first scene, and the third scene after a lapse of four months. But these two exceptions, out of many that might be cited, merely prove that dramatic genius can mold even the rigid time of the vaudeville stage to its needs.

Of course, there is the possibility of foreshortening time to meet the exigencies of vaudeville when the scene is not changed. For instance: a character telephones that he will be right over and solve the whole situation on which the punch of the playlet depends, and he enters five actual minutes later--although in real life it would take an hour to make the trip. This is an extreme instance, as time foreshortening goes, because it is one where the audience might grasp the disparity, and is given for its side-light of warning as well as for its suggestive value.

More simple foreshortenings of time are found in many playlets where the effect of an hour-or-more of events is compressed into the average twenty minutes. As an example of this perfectly safe use of shortening, note the quickness with which Harry returns to Miss Carey's apartment when he goes out to change into his regimentals. And as still safer foreshortenings, note the quickness with which Fred Saltus enters after Miss Carey goes to bed leaving Angela on the couch; and the quickness with which Angela falls in love with him--in fact, the entire compression inherent in the dramatic events which cannot be dissociated from time compression.

A safe att.i.tude for a playlet writer to take, is that all of his action shall mimic time reality as closely as his dramatic moment and the time-allowance of presentation will permit. This is considered in all dramatic art to be the ideal.

A good way to obviate disparaging comparison is to avoid reference to time--either in the dialogue or by the movements of events.

To sum up the whole matter, a vaudeville playlet may be considered as preserving unity of time when its action occurs in continuous minutes of about the length the episode would take to occur in real life.

3. Unity of Place

The commercial element of vaudeville often makes it inadvisable for a playlet to show more than one scene--very often an otherwise acceptable playlet is refused production because the cost of supplying special scenes makes it a bad business venture. [1]

[1] See Chapter III.

Yet it is permissible for a writer to give his playlet more than one place of happening--if he can make his story so compact and gripping that it does not lose in effect by the unavoidable few seconds' wait necessary to the changing of the scenery. But, even if his playlet is so big and dramatic that it admits of a change of scenes, he must conform it to the obvious vaudeville necessity of scenic alternation. [2] With this scenic "rule" the matter of unity of place in the playlet turns to the question of a playwright's art, which rules cannot limit.

[2] See Chapter I.

This third and last unity of the playlet may, however, for all save the master-craftsman, be safely stated as follows:

Except in rare instances a playlet should deal with a story that requires but one set of scenery, thus conserving the necessities of commercial vaudeville, aiding the smooth running of a performance, and preserving the dramatic unity of place.

We may now condense the three dramatic unities into a statement peculiarly applicable to the playlet--which would seem as though specially designed to fulfill them all:

A playlet preserves the dramatic unities when it shows one action in one time and in one place.