How to See a Play Part 4

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 p.r.i.c.k 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, n.o.body 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 cooperation 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 repet.i.tion 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 circ.u.mstance; 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 G.o.ds 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 d.i.c.kens 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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 repet.i.tion 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.s 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 a.n.a.lysis 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.

CHAPTER IX

CLIMAX

With the play properly introduced in act one, and the development carried forward upon that firm foundation in the following act or acts, the playwright approaches that part of his play which will, more than anything else, settle the fate of his work. As we have noted, if he have no such scene, he will not have a play at all. If on arrival it fail to seem indispensable and to be of dynamic quality, the play will be broken-winged, at best. The proof that he is a genuine playwright by rightful calling and not a literary person, producing books for closet reading, lies just here. The moment has come when, with his complication brought to the point where it must be solved, and all that has gone before waiting upon that solution, he must produce an effect with one skillful right-arm stroke which shall make the spectators a unit in the feeling that the evening has been well spent and his drama is true to the best tradition of the stage.

The stress has steadily increased to a degree at which it must be relieved. The strain is at the breaking point. The clash of characters or of circ.u.mstances operating upon characters is such that a crisis is at hand. By some ingenious interplay of word, action and scene, by an emotional crescendo crystallizing in a stage picture, by some unexpected reversion of incident or of human psychology (known in stage technic as peripety) or by an unforeseen accident in the fall of events, an electric change is exhibited, with the emotions of the _dramatis personae_ at white heat and the consequent enthraldom of the audience. Of all the varied pleasures of the playhouse, this moment, scene, turn of story, is that which appeals to the largest number and has made the theater most distinctive. This is not to say that a profound revelation of character, or a pungent reflection on life, made concrete in a situation, may not be a finer thing to do. It is merely to recognize a certain unique thing the stage can do in story telling, as against other forms, and to confess its universal attraction. While there is much in latter day play-making that seems to deaden the thrill of the obligatory scene, a clear comprehension of its central importance is basal in appreciation of the drama. A play may succeed without it, and a temporary school of psychologues may even pretend to pooh-pooh it as an outworn mode of cheap theatrics. The influence of Ibsen, and there is none more potent, has been cited as against the _scene a faire_, in the French sense; and it is true that his curtains are less obviously stressed and appear to aim not so much at the palpably heightened effects traditional of the development in French hands,--the most skillful hands in the world. But it remains true that this central and dominant scene is inherent in the very structure of dramatic writing. To repeat what was said before, the play that abandons climax may be good entertainment, but is by so much poorer drama. The best and most successful dramaturgy of our day therefore will seek to preserve the obligatory scene, but hide under more subtle technic the ways and means by which it is secured. The ways of the past became so open in the attempt to reach the result as to produce in many cases a feeling of bald artifice. This the later technic will do all in its power to avoid, while clinging persistently to the principle of climax, a principle of life just as truly as a principle of art. Physicians speak in a physiological sense of the grand climacteric of a man's age.

A test of any play may be found in the readiness with which it lends itself to a simple threefold statement of its story; the proposition, as it is called by technicians. This tabloid summary of the essence of the play is valuable in that it reveals plainly two things: whether there is a play in hand, and what and where is its obligatory scene. All who wish to train themselves to be critical rather than captious or silly in their estimate of drama, cannot be too strongly urged to practice this exercise of reducing a play to its lowest terms, its essential elements.

It will serve to clarify much that might remain otherwise a muddle. And one of the sure tests of a good play may be found here; if it is not a workable drama, either it will not readily reduce to a proposition or else cannot be stated propositionally at all. Further, a play that is a real play in substance, and not a hopelessly undramatic piece of writing arbitrarily cut up into scenes or acts, and expressed in dialogue (like some of the dramas of the Bengalese Tagh.o.r.e), can be stated clearly and simply in a brief paragraph. This matter of reduction to a skeleton which is structurally a _sine qua non_ may be ill.u.s.trated.

A proposition, to define it a little more carefully, is a threefold statement of the essence of a play, so organically related that each successive part depends upon and issues from the other. It contains a condition (or situation), an action, and a result. For instance, the proposition of _Macbeth_ may be expressed as follows:

I. A man, ambitious to be king, abetted by his wife, gains the throne through murder.

II. Remorse visits them both.

III. What will be the effect upon the pair?

Reflection upon this schematic summary will show that the interest of Shakespeare's great drama is not primarily a story interest; plot is not the chief thing, but character. The essential crux lies in the painful spectacle of the moral degeneration of husband and wife, sin working upon each according to their contrasted natures. Both have too much of the n.o.bler elements in them not to experience regret and the p.r.i.c.k of conscience. This makes the drama called _Macbeth_ a fine example of psychologic tragedy in the true sense.

Or take a well-known modern play, _Camille:_

I. A young man loves and lives with a member of the demi-monde.

II. His father pleads with her to give him up, for his own sake.

III. What will she do?

It will be observed that the way the lady of the camellias answers the question is the revelation of her character; so that the play again, although its story interest is sufficient, is primarily a character study, surrounded by Dumas fils with a rich atmosphere of understanding sympathy and with sentiment that to a later taste becomes sentimentality.

_The School for Scandal_ might be stated in this way:

I. An old husband brings his gay but well-meaning wife to town.

II. Her innocent love of fun involves her in scandal.

III. Will the two be reconciled, and how?

Ibsen's _A Doll's House_ may be thus expressed in a proposition:

I. A young wife has been babified by her husband.

II. Experiences open her eyes to the fact that she is not educated to be either wife or mother.

III. She leaves her husband until he can see what a woman should be in the home: a human being, not a doll.

These examples will serve to show what is meant by proposition and indicate more definitely the central purpose of the dramatic author and the technical demand made upon him. Be a.s.sured that under whatever varied garb of attraction in incident, scene and character, this underlying stern architectural necessity abides, and a drama's inability to reduce itself thus to a formula is a confession that in the structural sense the building is lop-sided and insecure, or, worse, that there is no structure there at all: nothing, so to put it, but a front elevation, a mere architect's suggestion.

As the spectator breathlessly enjoys the climax and watches to see that unknotting of the knot which gives the French word _denouement_ (unknotting) its meaning, he will notice that the intensity of the climactic effect is not derived alone from action and word; but that largely effective in the total result is the picture made upon the stage, in front of the background of setting which in itself has pictorial quality, by the grouped characters as the curtain falls.

This effect, conventionally called a _situation_, is for the eye as well as for the ear and the brain,--better, the heart. It would be an unfortunate limitation to our theater culture if we did not comprehend to the full how large a part of the effect of a good play is due to the ever-changing series of artistic stage pictures furnished by the dramatist in collaboration with the actors and the stage manager. This principle is important throughout a play, but gets its most vivid ill.u.s.tration in the climax; hence, I enlarge upon it at this point.

Among the most novel, fruitful and interesting experiments now being made in the theater here and abroad may be mentioned the attempts to introduce more subtle and imaginative treatment of the possibilities of color and form in stage setting than have hitherto obtained. The reaction influenced by familiarity with the unadorned simplicity of the Elizabethans, the Gordon Craig symbolism, the frank attempt to subst.i.tute artistic suggestion for the stupid and expensive reproduction on the stage of what is called "real life," are phases of this movement, in which Germany and Russia have been prominent. The stage manager and scene deviser are daily becoming more important factors in the production of a play; and along with this goes a clearer perception of the values of grouping and regrouping on the part of the plastic elements behind the footlights.[D] Many a scenic moment, many a climax, may be materially damaged by a failure to place the characters in such relative positions as shall visualize the dramatic feeling of the scene and reveal in terms of picture the dramatist's meaning. After all, the time-honored convention that the main character, or characters, should, at the moment when they are dominant in the story, take the center of the stage, is no empty convention; it is based on logic and geometry.

There is a direct correspondence between the unity of emotion concentrated in a group of persons and the eye effect which reports that fact. I have seen so fine a climax as that in Jones's _The Hypocrites_--one of the very best in the modern repertory--well nigh ruined by a stock company, when, owing to the purely arbitrary demand that the leading man should have the center at a crucial moment, although in the logic of the action he did not belong there, the two young lovers who were dramatically central in the scene were shunted off to the side, and the leading man, whose true position was in the deep background, delivered his curtain speech close up to the footlights on a spot mathematically exact in its historic significance. True dramatic relations were sacrificed to relative salaries, and, as a result, a scene which naturally receives half a dozen curtain calls, went off with comparative tameness. It was a striking demonstration of the importance of picture on the stage as an externalization of dramatic facts.

If the theater-goer will keep an eye upon this aspect of the drama, he will add much of interest to the content of his pleasure and do justice to a very important and easily overlooked phase of technic. It is common in criticism, often professional, to sneer at the tendency of modern actors, under the stage manager's guidance, continually to shift positions while the dialogue is under way; thus producing an unnecessarily uneasy effect of meaningless action. As a generalization, it may be said that this is done (though at times no doubt, overdone) on a principle that is entirely sound: it expresses the desire for a new picture, a recognition of the law that, in drama, composition to the eye is as truly a principle as it is in painting. And with that consideration goes the additional fact that motion implies emotion; than which there is no surer law in psycho-physics. Abuse of the law, on the stage, is beyond question possible, and frequently met. But a redistribution of the positions of actors on the boards, when not abused, means they have moved under the compulsion of some stress of feeling and then the movement is an external symbol of an internal state of mind. The drama must express the things within by things without, in this way; that is its method. The audience is only properly irritated when a stage moment which, from the nature of its psychology, calls for the static, is injured by an unrelated, fussy, bodily activity. Motion in such a case becomes as foolish as the scene shifting in one of the highest colored and most phantasmagoric of our dreams. The wise stage director will not call for a change of picture unless it represents a psychologic fact.

Two men converse at a table; one communicates to the other, quietly and in conversational tone, a fact of alarming nature. The other leaps to his feet with an exclamation and paces the floor as he talks about it; nothing is more fitting, because nothing is truer to life. The repressive style of acting to-day, which might try to express this situation purely by facial work, goes too far in abandoning the legitimate tools of the craft. Let me repeat that, despite all the refining upon older, more violent and crudely expressive methods of technic, the stage must, from its very nature, indicate the emotions of human beings by objective, concrete bodily reaction. The Greek word for drama means _doing_. To exhibit feeling is to do something.

Or let us take a more composite group: that which is seen in a drawing room, with various knots of people talking together just before dinner is announced. A shift in the groups, besides effecting the double purpose of pleasing the eye and allowing certain portions of the dialogue to come forward and get the ear of the audience, also incidentally tells the truth: these groups in reality would shift and change more or less by the law of social convenience. The general greetings of such an occasion would call for it. In a word, then, the stage is, among other things, a plastic representation of life, forever making an appeal to the eye. The application of this to the climax shows how vastly important its pictorial side may be.

The climax that is prolonged is always in danger. Lead up to it slowly and surely, secure the effect, and then get away from it instantly by lowering the curtain. Do not fumble with it, or succ.u.mb to the insinuating temptation of clinging to what is so effective. The dramatist here is like a fond father loath to say _farewell_ to his favorite child. But say the parting word he must, if he would have his offspring prosper and not, like many a father ere this, keep the child with him to its detriment. A second too much, and the whole thing will he imperiled. At the _denouement_, every syllable must be weighed, nor found wanting; every extraneous word ruthlessly cut out, the feats of fine language so welcome in other forms of literary composition shunned as an arch enemy. Colloquialism, instead of literary speech, even bad grammar where more formal book-speech seems to dampen the fire, must be instinctively sought. And whenever the action itself, backed by the scenery, can convey what is aimed at, silence is best of all; for then, if ever, silence is indeed golden. All this the spectator will quietly note, sitting in his seat of judgment, ready to show his pleasure or displeasure, according to what is done.