Dramatic Technique Part 90

scene with the Young Hajji kicks him off the seat and resumes his Beggar is postponed old place.

until after the Caliph Young Beggar slinks away.

and Marsinah leave. Scarcely is Hajji seated when the Sultan Altered when the play enters on his white donkey with a torch-light was written.] procession.

The Sultan dismounts and knocks at the Mosque.

The Mosque is opened by the Priest.

The Priest, when he learns it is the Sultan, brings out Zira to him.

The Sultan reveals himself in a verse to Zira.

Zira replies in a rhyme.

The Sultan conducts Zira to a litter.

He re-mounts his donkey.

The procession moves past Hajji.

Hajji stretches out his hand for alms, veiling his face.

The procession disappears. The street grows dark again.

The Mosque is shut.

Hajji is left alone in the moonlight.

He draws out the old gourd from behind the stone seat.

A line of philosophy summing up his day.

Something, perhaps, on "life and water."

He drinks his fill, puts the gourd away, leans back, and goes to sleep, breathing regularly._

_Curtain_[16]

Does not this careful scenario make very clear what are the steps in good scenario writing? First comes structure,--ordering for clearness and correct emphasis in the story-telling. Then, with the scenario kept flexible and subject to change till the last possible moment, come many changes big and little, for better characterization and more atmosphere--see pp. 461-463.

Finally, more than anything else, as the author puts last touches to his scenario, or revises the play he has written from it, he scans its details in relation to the probable att.i.tude toward them of his public.

In the relation of that public to his subject and his treatment of it lie the most difficult problems of the dramatist. Solving them means the difference between the will to conquer and victory.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Letters of Henrik Ibsen_, p. 325. For a similar outline see that on _Faste_, p. 151.

[2] _The Green Book Magazine_, February, 1914.

[3] See pp. 276-278.

[4] See Kismet Scenario, pp. 474-507.

[5] Samuel French, publisher. New York.

[6] Samuel French, publisher, New York.

[7] Samuel French, publisher, New York.

[8] Samuel French, publisher, New York.

[9] See pp. 154-182.

[10] See p. 287.

[11] _European Dramatists. Henrik Ibsen_. A. Henderson. Pp. 175-176.

Stewart & Kidd Co., Cincinnati.

[12] The sentence is elliptical in the original.

[13] _Ibsen's Workshop_, pp. 91-92. Copyright, 1911, by Chas.

Scribner's Sons, New York.

[14] _Ibsen's Workshop_, pp. 92-95.

[15] Printed by permission of Mr. k.n.o.bloch from his own ma.n.u.script.

[16] For the play see _Kismet_, Methuen & Co., Ltd., London.

CHAPTER X

THE DRAMATIST AND HIS PUBLIC

Probably most dramatists have found that any play, either as a scenario or a completed ma.n.u.script, is not a matter of writing but of frequent re-writing. Study _From Ibsen's Workshop_ or most of the cases cited by Binet and Pa.s.sy,[1] and it becomes evident that the first draft of a scenario or play is usually made mainly for clearness. That will be gained by good construction and correct emphasis. There follows a re-writing in which characterization improves greatly and dialogue becomes characterizing and attractive in itself. Either in this or possible later re-writings, the dramatist shapes his material more and more in relation to the public he wishes to address, for a dramatist is, after all, a sort of public speaker. Unlike the platform orator, however, he speaks indirectly to his audience--through people and under conditions he cannot wholly control. None the less, much if not all that concerns the persuasion of public argumentation concerns the dramatist.

This does not in any sense mean that an author must truckle to his audience. Far from it. Yet no dramatist can work care free in regard to his audience. He must consider their natural likes and dislikes, interests and indifferences, their probable knowledge of his subject as well as their probable approach to it. As Mr. Archer has pointed out: "The moment a playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded of Western human beings a.s.sembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence that mere self-expression is his aim."[2]

Once for all, what is "truckling to an audience"? When an author, believing that the end of his play should be tragic, so plans his work that until the last act or even the middle of that act, a tragic ending is the logical conclusion, and then because he is told or believes that an audience will quit the theatre much more contented if the ending be happy, he forces a pleasant ending on his play, he is untrue to himself, dishonest with his art, and truckles to his public. A very large part of American audiences and many producers believe that any play is only mere entertainment and consequently may and should be so manipulated as to please the public even in its most unthinking mood. No man who does that is a dramatist. He is merely a hack playwright, bribed by the hope of immediate gain into slavish obedience to the most unthinking part of the public.

On the other hand, an author is very foolish if he does not remember certain fundamental principles about audiences in a theatre. First, no matter what in his material attracts him, people rather than ideas arouse the interest of the general public. Secondly, even yet action far more than characterization wins and holds the attention of the great majority. These facts do not mean, however, that a dramatist must busy himself only with plays of action or characterization, foregoing all problems or thesis material. They do mean that if he is to write a play of ideas he must recognize that his task is the more difficult because of his public and that he must so handle it through the characterization and the action as to make his ideas widely interesting. In brief, insisting on saying what he wishes to say, he must learn to speak in terms his audience will readily understand.

More than once a play good in itself has gone astray because written too much unto the author's self, in the sense that certain figures have interested him more than others and he has forgotten that they are not likely to be interesting to the public at large and must be made so. For instance, a would-be adapter believed that the hero of the tale he was dramatizing would remain on the stage the hero still, but in action another character, with his songs and rough humor, and his constant action, in sharp contrast with the quiet speech and restrained movement of the central figure of the story, ran off with the interest.

Consequently this adaptation, though unusually well done in all other respects, went awry.

Another aspect of the same difficulty is that an author forgets to consider carefully whether something he finds comic or tragic will naturally be the same for his audiences. In a prize play produced some years ago in Germany, _Belinda_, the author found much comedy in the following situation. A rather addle-pated man has for some years been paying large sums to a correspondent, a woman as he believes, who has been painting his portrait again and again from photographs he has sent her. Little by little he has fallen in love with this correspondent. The day comes when he is awaiting a visit from her with the utmost delight.

A servant, who knows that the woman is expected, enters looking utterly bewildered, and announces her arrival. There walks into the room a wizened Jewish picture dealer, who has all these years been playing on the vanity of the younger man for his own gain. Unfortunately the author forgot that an off-stage figure must be made very attractive if sympathy is to go with it rather than with a figure seen and known, or that the on-stage figure must be very unattractive if sympathy is not to go with it in contrast to a figure unseen. Consequently, when the Jew walked on he was greeted, not as the author expected with shouts of laughter, but with an aghast silence and obvious sympathy for the deceived man. Just at that point the play began to go to pieces because the author had misjudged, or not at all considered, the relation of the public to his material.

Where, perhaps, authors fail with their public more than anywhere else is in motivation of the conduct of their characters.[3] Too frequently a play slips because conduct as explained in it, though wholly convincing to the dramatist, does not similarly affect his public. It is useless for him to say stoutly that he knows the incident happened just in this way, or that the audience ought to know better than to think it could happen differently. As it is hopeless in life merely to protest that you are telling the truth when everybody is convinced that you are lying, it is wasted time for a dramatist to stand his ground in a matter of motivation if he has not succeeded in making that motivation convincing.

For instance, there suddenly appears in the office of the hero of a play a former acquaintance of his, an actress. She has come to see him, if you please, even as her act in the theatre is playing. That is, simply because she so wished she has left the theatre during the performance.

Now the dramatist may have known of such a case and people unacquainted with life behind the curtain may accept the situation, but people of the slightest experience in the theatre will know that no actor or actress playing an important role is allowed to leave during the performance.

Instantly the scene becomes improbable for those people--and they are many. It must be so motivated as to be a probable exception in conduct, or the whole situation must be changed.

If it be clear that, though a dramatist should never truckle to his audience, he cannot hope to write successfully unless at some time in his composition he revises his material with a view to the general intelligence, natural interests, and prejudices of his audience so far as his special subject is concerned, it is equally true that publics change greatly in their tastes. A young dramatist may learn much as to such s.h.i.+ftings in public taste by watching the revivals of plays once very successful. In Shakespeare's day, for instance, the public would accept a mingling of the real and unreal with equanimity. Today it takes all the genius of Shakespeare to make the scenes of the ghost of Hamlet's father convincing. In reading Chapman's _Bussy d'Ambois_, with its strange commingling of real figures and ghosts, we today draw back disappointed because we feel that what has seemed real becomes with the entrance of the ghost only melodrama sublimated by some excellent characterization and fine poetry. As has already been pointed out, in Elizabethan days the public found cause for mirth in much which today is painful. Watch in performance the scene of _Twelfth Night_ in which Toby, the Fool, and Maria deride Malvolio until they almost make him believe himself mad, and you have an admirable instance of changed taste. When first produced, it probably went with shouts of laughter.

Because of sympathy for Malvolio it never goes well today. The public no longer finds madness unquestionably comic; it has its hesitations on practical jokes; it has lost a very little its sure enjoyment of drunkenness, especially in women. The day may conceivably come of which no one could say, as of the stage of our time: "The single expletive 'd.a.m.n' has saved many a would-be comic situation."

The att.i.tude of a playwright should not be, "If my public ordinarily does not feel about this as I do, I will cut it out or make it conform to their usual tastes," but "Knowing perfectly what the att.i.tude of the public is toward my material, I will not cut it out until I have proved that it is not in my power to make the audience feel it as I do." Just here lies the worst temptation of the playwright. He who keeps his eye more on the money box than artistic self-respect will little by little limit his choice of subjects and conventionalize his treatment of them because he is told or believes that the public will not stand for this or that. Is it not, however, a little strange that almost everything which leading play-placers, managers, and actors have in the past twenty-five years declared the public would unwillingly accept or would not accept at all has since become not only acceptable but often popular. Some years ago it was a truism among readers of ma.n.u.script plays that college life was too limited in interest to appeal to the general theatre public. Then Mr. Ade's _The College Widow_ proved these prophets wrong. After this play trailed _Brown of Harvard_ and a half-dozen other college plays which, whether good, bad, or indifferent artistically, were all warmly received by the public. Another statement once accepted in the theatrical world of New York was that American audiences no longer cared for farce, but _Seven Days_, followed by a crowding group of successes, changed all that. All this was not the result of any sudden revulsion on the part of the public, but came because some intelligent and clever workman, determining to make his interests and his sense of values the public's, labored until he accomplished the task. Forthwith a delighted public begged for more and what was declared impossible became the vogue. Just at present there is a troublesome convention that the American public will not accept anything but farce or comedy. This means only that at the moment our writers of serious plays are not adept enough to win away large audiences from farce and comedy or to build up special audiences for their plays. Nevertheless, sooner or later, they or their successors will conquer such a public.

In curious contradiction to the existing att.i.tude that audiences will like only what they at present like, much advice is given as to novelty.

"Find something new in substance or form and your fortune is made" is the implication. Wherein lies novelty of plot has already been explained.[4] Certainly the large amount of experimentation which has been going on in recent years in one-act plays, two-act plays, or groups of one-act pieces bound together by a prologue and an epilogue, has all been well worth while, making as it does for greater flexibility of dramatic form. Yet it is unfortunately true at the present moment that most audiences prefer a three-or four-act play to something in two acts because the uninterrupted attention demanded by the last form asks too much from them. They prefer the three-act or four-act division to a group of one-act plays tied together by a prologue and an epilogue, because mere difference of form has no particular attraction for them and they do not willingly s.h.i.+ft their interest as frequently as a group of one-act plays requires. Nevertheless there is nothing completely deterrent for a dramatist in any of these circ.u.mstances; merely cause why, in every case, after thinking of the subject in relation to himself, he should ultimately consider it with equal care in relation to the audience for which he intends it. When, too, he is selecting his form he should observe whether though attractive to him, it may not be so difficult or repellent for the general public that another more conventional form is desirable. If he becomes sure that he cannot get his desired effects except in the form first chosen he must work until he makes it acceptable to the public or put aside his subject. The final test is not: "What ordinarily do the public like in a subject like mine and in what form are they accustomed to see my subject treated," but: "Can I so present the form I prefer as to make the public like equally with me what I find interesting in my subject?" That is, though presentation of a chosen subject should be flexible, the central purposes, human and artistic, of the play, should be maintained inflexibly.

Bearing the audience in mind as one writes may affect the whole play, but more often it affects details--particularly order. The scenario of _Kismet_[5] has been printed in full chiefly that the many changes it underwent in shaping it for final presentation might be clear. Among the many instances note, in Act II, that in the original form the love pa.s.sage of Hajji followed plotting for the murder. When the play was in rehearsal, both actor and author felt at once that the sympathy it was necessary to maintain in the audience for Hajji would be lost if he turned immediately from such b.l.o.o.d.y plotting to the love scene. For this reason the order was changed. Surely there is no harm in such a s.h.i.+fting, for the story develops just as well and the characterization is as humanly true. This is a perfect ill.u.s.tration of persuasive arrangement. Take now the case of the torturing of Hajji, of which much was made in the original scenario. It is changed to the blow with the key because the horror of the scene when acted was too great and everything necessary is accomplished with the key. Here is a change made not to please the author but to make the material as treated produce in the audience the desired results, yet the change in no way interferes with any of the purposes of the dramatist. An ill.u.s.tration of the way in which a dramatist standing his ground because he is sure of the rightness of his psychology may win over his public is found in _La Princesse Georges_ of Dumas fils. So great was the sympathy of the audience with Severine in her mortified wifehood that at the original performance, when she forgave her husband at the end, there were many dissenting cries. Dumas fils had foreseen this, but believing the ending truer to life than any other could be, he insisted on it.

Ultimately the ending was accepted by the public as made necessary by the rest of the play.