How to See a Play

Israel Zangwill has turned, like Barrie, Galsworthy and Bennett, from fiction to the play, and The Children of the Ghetto, Merely Mary Ann, The Melting Pot, The War God and The Next Religion show progressively a firmer technic and the use of larger themes. Other playwrights like Alfred Sutro, Sidney Grundy, W. S. Maugham, Hubert Davies, and Captain Marshall have a skillful hand, and in the cases of Maugham and Davies, especially the latter, clever social satire has come from their pens. Louis R. Parker has shown his range and skill in successful dramas so widely divergent as Rosemary, Pomander Walk and Disraeli.

It may be seen from this category, suggestive rather than complete, that there is in England ample evidence for the statement that drama is now being vigorously produced and must be reckoned with as an appreciable and welcome part of contemporary letters. In the United States, so far, the showing is slighter and less impressive. Yet it is within the facts to say that the native play-making has waxed more serious-minded and skillful (this especially in the last few years) and so has become a definite adjunct to the general movement toward the reinvestiture of drama.

In the prose drama which attempts honestly to reproduce American social conditions, elder men like Howard and Herne, and later ones like Thomas, Gillette and Clyde Fitch, have done worthy pioneer work. Among many younger playwrights who are fast pressing to the front, Eugene Walter, who in The Easiest Way wrote one of the best realistic plays of the day, Edward Sheldon, with a dozen interesting dramas to his credit, notably The Nigger and Romance; and William Vaughan Moody, whose material in both The Great Divide and The Faith Healer is healthfully American and truthful, although the handling is romantic and that of the poet, deserve first mention.

Women are increasingly prominent in this recent activity and in such hands as those of Rachel Crothers, Ann Flexner, Marguerite Merrington, Margaret Mayo and Eleanor Gates our social life is likely to be exploited in a way to hint at its problems, and truthfully and amusingly set forth its types.

Moody, though he wrote his stage plays in prose, was essentially the poet in viewpoint and imagination. A poet too, despite the fact that more than half his work is in prose, is Percy Mackaye, the son of a distinguished earlier playwright and theater reformer, author of Hazel Kirke and Paul Kauvar. Mr. Mackaye's prose comedy Mater, high comedy in the best sense, and his satiric burlesque, Anti-Matrimony, together with the thoughtful drama Tomorrow, which seeks to incorporate the new conception of eugenics in a vital story of the day, are good examples of one aspect of his work; and Jeanne d'Arc, Sapho and Phaon, verse plays, and the romantic spectacle play, A Thousand Years Ago, illustrate his poetic endeavor. Taking a hint from a short story by Hawthorne, he has written in The Scarecrow one of the strongest and noblest serious dramas yet wrought by an American. He has also done much for the pageant and outdoor masque, as his The Canterbury Pilgrims, Sanctuary and St. Louis, A Civic Masque, presented in May of 1914 on an heroic scale in that city, testify. A poet, whether in lyric or dramatic expression, is Josephine Preston Peabody. Her lovely reshaping of the familiar legend known best in the hands of Browning, The Piper, took the prize at the Stratford on Avon spring Shakespeare festival some years ago, and has been successful since both in England and America. Her other dramatic writing has not as yet met so well the stage demands, but is conspicuous for charm and ideality.

In the imaginative field of romance, poetry and allegory we may also place the Americanized Englishman, Charles Rann Kennedy, who has put the touch of the poet and prophet upon homely modern material. His beautiful morality play, The Servant in the House, secured his reputation and later plays from The Winter Feast to The Idol Breaker, inclusive of several shorter pieces, the one act form being definitely practiced by this author, have been interesting work, skillful of technic and surcharged with social sympathy and significance. Edward Knoblauch, the author of The Faun, of Milestones in collaboration with Mr. Bennett, and of the fantastic oriental divertissement, Kismet; and Austin Strong, who wrote The Toymaker of Nuremberg, are among the younger dramatists from whom much may yet be expected.

In this enumeration, all too scant to do justice to newer drama in the United States, especially in the field of realistic satire and humorous perception of the large-scaled clashes of our social life, it must be understood that I perforce omit to mention fully two score able and earnest young workers who are showing a most creditable desire to depict American conditions and have learned, or are rapidly learning, the use of their stage tools. The purpose here is to name enough of personal accomplishment to buttress the claim that a promising school has arisen on the native soil with aims and methods similar to those abroad.

And all this work, English or American, shows certain ear-marks to bind it together and declare it of our day in comparison with the past. What are these distinctive features?

On the side of technic, a greater and greater insistence on telling the story dramatically, with more of truth, to the exclusion of all that is non-dramatic, although preserved in the conventions of the theater for perhaps centuries; the elimination of subplot and of subsidiary characters which were of old deemed necessary for purposes of exposition; the avoidance of the prologue and such ancient and useful devices as the aside and the soliloquy; and such simplification of form that the typical play shall reduce itself most likely to three acts, and is almost always less than five; a play that often has but one scene where the action is compressed within the time limits of a few hours, or, at the most, a day or two. All this is the outcome of the influence of Ibsen with its subtlety, expository methods and its intenser psychology. In word, dress, action and scene, too, this modern type of drama approximates closer to life; and inclines to minimize scenery save as congruous background, thus implying a distinct rebellion from the stupidly literal scenic envisagement for which the influence of a Belasco is responsible. The new technic also has, in its seeking for an effect of verisimilitude, adopted the naturalistic key of life in its acting values and has built small theaters better adapted to this quieter, more penetrating presentation.

In regard to subject matter, and the author's attitude to his work, a marked tendency may be seen to emphasize personality in the character drawing, to make it of central interest (contrasted with plot) and a bold attempt to present it in the more minute variations of motive and act rather than in those more obvious reactions to life which have hitherto characterized stage treatment; and equally noticeable if not the dominant note of this latter-day drama, has been the social sympathy expressed in it and making it fairly resonant with kindly human values: the author's desire to see justice done to the under-dog in the social struggle; to extend a fraternal hand to the derelicts of the earth, to understand the poor and strive to help those who are weak or lost; all the underlings and incompetents and ill-doers of earth find their explainers and defenders in these writers. This is the note which sounds in the fraternalism of Kennedy's The Servant in the House, the arraignment of society in Walter's The Easiest Way and Paterson's Rebellion, the contrast of the ideals of east and west in Moody's The Great Divide, and the democratic fellowship of Sheldon's Salvation Nell. It is the note abroad which gives meaning to Hauptmann's The Weavers, Galsworthy's Justice and Wedekind's The Awakening of Spring, different as they are from each other. It stands for a tolerant, even loving comprehension of the other fellow's case. There is in it a belief in the age, too, and in modern man; a faith in democracy and an aspiration to see established on the earth a social condition which will make democracy a fact, not merely a convenient political catch-word.

Some authors, in their obsession with truth on the stage, have too much neglected the fundamental demands of the theater and so sacrificed the crisp crescendo treatment of crisis in climax as to indulge in a tame, undramatic and bafflingly subtle manipulation of the story; a remark applicable, for example, to a writer like Granville Barker.

But the growth and gains in both countries, with America modestly second, are encouraging. In these modern hands the play has been simplified, deepened, made more truthful, more sympathetic; and is now being given the expressional form that means literature. The bad, the cheap, the flimsy are still being produced, of course, in plenty; so has it always been, so ever will be. But the drama that is worthy, skillful, refreshing in these different kinds – farce, comedy light, polite, or satiric; broad comedy or high, melodrama, tragedy, romance and morality – is now offered, steadily, generously, and it depends upon the theater-goer who has trained himself to know, to reject and accept rightly, to appreciate and so make secure the life of all drama that is worth preservation.

This survey of the English theater and the drama which has been produced in it from the beginning – a survey the brevity of which will not detract, it may be hoped, from its clearness, may serve to place our play-goer in a position the better to appreciate the present conditions; and to give him more respect for a form of literature which he turns to to-day for intelligent recreation, deeming it a helpfully stimulating form of art. From this vantage-point, he may now approach a consideration of the drama as an artistic problem. He will be readier than before, perhaps, to realize that the playwright, with this history behind him, is the creature of a long and important development, in a double sense: in his treatment of life, and in the manner of that treatment.

Naturally, the theater-goer will not stop with the English product. The necessity alone of understanding Ibsen, as the main figure in this complex modern movement, will lead him to a study of the author of A Doll's House. And, working from center to circumference, he will with ever increasing stimulation and delight become familiar with many other foreign dramatists of national or international importance. He will give attention to those other Scandinavians, Strindberg, Drachman and Björnson; to the Russians, Tolstoy, Tchekoff and Gorky; to Frenchmen like Rostand and Maeterlinck, Becque, Hervieu, Lavedan, Donnay and Brieux; to the Germans and Austrians, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Wedekind, Hofmansthal and Schnitzler; to the Italian, D'Annunzio, and the Spanish Echgeragay, – to mention but a few. It may even be that, once aroused to the value of the expression of the Present in these representative writers for the stage, he will wish to trace the dramatic history behind them in their respective countries, as he has (supposedly) already done with the dramatists of his own tongue. If he do so, the play-goer will surely add greatly not only to his general literary culture but to his power of true appreciation of the play of the moment he may be witnessing. For all this reading and reflection and comparison will tend to make him a critic-in-the-seat who settles the fate of plays to-day because he knows the plays of yesterday and yesteryear.

CHAPTER VI

THE PLAY AS THEME AND PERSONAL VIEW

WE may now come directly to a consideration of the play regarded as a work of art and a piece of life. After all, this is the central aim in the attempt to become intelligent in our play-going. A play may properly be thought of as a theme; it has a definite subject, which involves a personal opinion about life on the author's part; a view of human beings in their complex interrelations the sum of which make up man's existence on this globe.

The play has a story, of course, and that story is so handled as to constitute a plot: meaning a tangle of circumstances in which the fates of a handful of human beings are involved, a tangle to which it is the business of the plot to give meaning and direction. But back of the story, in any drama that rises to some worth, there is a theme, in a sense. Thus, the theme of Macbeth is the degenerating effect of sin upon the natures of the king and his spouse; and the theme of Ibsen's A Doll's House is the evil results of treating a grown-up woman as if she were a mere puppet with little or no relation to life's serious realities.

The thing that gives dignity and value to any play is to be found just here: a distinctive theme, which is over and above the interest of story-plot, sinks into the consciousness of the spectator or reader, and gives him stimulating thoughts about life and living long after he may have quite forgotten the fable which made the framework for this suggestive impulse of the dramatist. Give the statement a practical test. Plenty of plays suffice well enough perhaps to fill an evening pleasantly, yet have no theme at all, no idea which one can take with him from the playhouse and ruminate at leisure. For, although the story may be skillfully handled and the technic of the piece be satisfying, if it is not about anything, the rational auditor is vaguely dissatisfied and finds in the final estimate that all such plays fall below those that really have a theme. To illustrate: Mr. Augustus Thomas's fine play, The Witching Hour, has a theme embedded in a good, old-fashioned melodramatic story; and this is one of the reasons for its great success. But the same author's Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots, though executed with practiced skill, has no theme at all and therefore is at the best an empty, if amusing, trifle, far below the dramatist's full powers. Frankly, it is a pot boiler. And, similarly, Mr. Thomas's capital western American drama, Arizona, while primarily and apparently story for its own sake, takes on an added virtue because it illustrates, in a story-setting, certain typical and worthy American traits to be found at the time and under those conditions in the far west. To have a theme is not to be didactic, neither to argue for a thesis nor moot a problem. It is simply to have an opinion about life involved in and rising naturally out of the story, and never, never lugged in by the heels. The true dramatist does not tell a story because he has a theme he wishes to impose upon the audience; on the contrary, he tells his story because he sees life that way, in terms of plot, of drama, and in its course, and in spite of himself, a certain notion or view about sublunary things enters into the structure of the whole creation, and emanates from it like an atmosphere. One of the very best comedies of modern times is the late Sidney Grundy's A Pair of Spectacles. It has sound technic, delightful characterization, and a simple, plausible, coherent and interesting fable. But, beyond this, it has a theme, a heart-warming one: namely, that one who sees life through the kindly lenses of the optimist is not only happier, but gets the best results from his fellow beings; in short, is nearer the truth. And no one should doubt that this theme goes far toward explaining the remarkable vogue of this admirable comedy. Without a theme so clear, agreeable and interpretive, a play equally skillful would never have had like fortune.

And this theme in a play, as was hinted, must, to be acceptable, express the author's personal opinion, honestly, fearlessly put forth. If it be merely what he ought to think in the premises, what others conventionally think, what it will, in his opinion, or that of the producer of the play, pay to think, the drama will not ring true, and will be likely to fail, even if the technic of a lifetime bolster it up. It must embody a truth relative to the writer, a fact about life as he sees it, and nothing else. A theme in a play cannot be abstract truth, for to tell us of abstract truth is the métier of the philosopher, and herein lies his difference from the stage story-teller. Relative truth is the play-maker's aim and the paramount demand upon him is that he be sincere. He must give a view of life in his story which is an honest statement of what human beings and human happenings really are in his experience. If his experience has been so peculiar or unique as to make his themes absurd and impossible to people in general, then his play will pretty surely fail. He pays the penalty of his warped, or too limited or degenerate experience. No matter: show the thing as he sees it and knows it, that he must; and then take his chances.

And so convincing, so winning is sincerity, that even when the view that lies at the heart of the theme appears monstrous and out of all belief, yet it will stand a better chance of acceptance than if the author had trimmed his sails to every wind of favor that blows.

Mr. Kennedy wrote an odd drama a few years ago called The Servant in the House, in which he did a most unconventional thing in the way of introducing a mystic stranger out of the East into the midst of an ordinary mundane English household. Anybody examining such a play in advance, and aware of what sort of drama was typical of our day, might have been forgiven had he absolutely refused to have faith in such a work. But the author was one person who did have faith in it; he had a fine theme: the idea that the Christ ideal, when projected into daily life – instead of cried up once a week in church – and there acted on, is efficacious. He had an unshaken belief in this idea. And he conquered, because he dared to substitute for the conventional and supposed inevitable demand an apparently unpopular personal conviction. He found, as men who dare commonly do, that the assumed personal view was the general view which no one had had the courage before to express.

In the same way, M. Maeterlinck, another idealist of the day, wrote The Blue Bird. It is safe to say that those in a position to be wise in matters dramatic would never have predicted the enormous success of this simple child play in various countries. But the writer dared to vent his ideas and feelings with regard to childhood and concerning the spiritual aspirations of all mankind; in other words, he chose a theme for some other reason than because it was good, tried theater material; and the world knows the result. It may be said without hesitation that more plays fail in the attempt to modify view in favor of the supposed view of others – the audience, the manager or somebody else – than fail because the dramatist has sturdily stuck to his point of view and honestly set down in his story his own private reaction to the wonderful thing called life; a general possession and yet not one thing, but having as many sides as there are persons in the world to live it.

Consider, for example, the number of dramas that, instead of carrying through the theme consistently to the end, are deflected from their proper course through the playwright's desire (more often it is an unwilling concession to others' desire) to furnish that tradition-condiment, a "pleasant ending." Now everybody normal would rather have a play end well than not; he who courts misery for its own sake is a fool. But, if not a fool, he does not wish the pleasantness at the expense of truth, because then the pleasantness is no longer pleasant to the educated taste, and so defeats its own end. And it is an observed fact that some stories, whether fiction or drama, "begin to end well," as Stevenson expressed it; while others, just as truly, begin to end ill. Hence, when such themes are manhandled by the cheap, dishonest wresting of events or characters or both, so as presumably to send the audience home "happy," we get a wretched malversion of art, – and without at all attaining the object in view. For even the average, or garden-variety, of audience is uneasy at the insult offered its intelligence in such a nefarious transaction. It has been asked to witness a piece of real life, for, testimony to the contrary notwithstanding, that is what an audience takes every play to be. Up to a certain point, this presentation of life is convincing; then, for the sake of leaving an impression that all is well because two persons are united who never should be, or because the hero didn't die when he really did, or because coincidence is piled on coincidence to make a fairy tale situation at which a fairly intelligent cow would rebel, presto, a lie has to be told that would not deceive the very children in the seats. It is pleasant to record truthfully that this miserable and mistaken demand on the part of the short-sighted purveyors of commercialized dramatic wares is yielding gradually to the more enlightened notion that any audience wants a play to be consistent with itself, and feels that too high a price can be paid even for the good ending whose false deification has played havoc with true dramatic interests.

Another mode of dishonesty, in which the writer of a play fails in theme, is to be found whenever, instead of sticking to his subject matter and giving it the unity of his main interest and the wholeness of effect derived from paying it undivided attention, extraneous matter is introduced for the sake of temporary alleviation. Not to stick to your theme is almost as bad at times as to have none. No doubt the temptation comes to all practical playwrights and is a considerable one. But it must be resisted if they are to remain self-respecting artists. The late Clyde Fitch, skilled man of the theater though he was, sinned not seldom in this respect. He sometimes introduced scenes effective for novelty and truth of local color, but so little related to the whole that the trained auditor might well have met him with the famous question asked by the Greek audiences of their dramatists who strayed from their theme: "What has this to do with Apollo?" The remark applies to the drastically powerful scene in his posthumous play The City, where the theme which was plainly announced in the first act is lost sight of in the dramatist's desire to use material well adapted to secure a sensational effect in his climax. It is only fair to say that, had this drama received the final molding at the author's hands, it might have been modified to some extent. But there is no question that this was a tendency with Fitch.

The late Oscar Wilde had an almost unparalleled gift for witty epigrammatic dialogue. In his two clever comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance, he allowed this gift to run away with him to such an extent that the opening acts of both pieces contain many speeches lifted from his notebooks, seemingly, and placed arbitrarily in the mouths of sundry persons of the play: some of the speeches could quite as well have been spoken by others. This constituted a defect which might have seriously militated against the success of those dramas had they not possessed in full measure brilliant qualities of genuine constructive play-making. The theme, after all, was there, once it was started; and so was the deft handling. But dialogue not motivated by character or necessitated by story is always an injury, and much drama to-day suffers from this fault. The producer of the play declares that its tone is too steadily serious and demands the insertion of some humor to lighten it, and the playwright, poor, helpless wight, yields, though he knows he is sinning against the Holy Ghost of his art. Or perhaps the play is too short to fill the required time and so padding is deemed necessary;[2 - When our theater has become thoroughly artistic, plays will not, as at present, be stretched out beyond the natural size, but will be confined to a shorter playing time and the evening filled out with a curtain raiser or after piece, as is now so common abroad.] or it may be that the ignorance or short-sightedness of those producing the play will lead them to confuse the interests of the chief player with that of the piece itself; and so a departure from theme follows, and unity be sacrificed. That is what unity means: sticking to theme.

And unity of story, be sure, waits on unity of theme. This insistence upon singleness of purpose in a play, clinging to it against all allurements, does not imply that what is known as a subplot may not be allowed in a drama. It was common in the past and can still be seen to-day, though the tendency of modern technic is to abandon it for the sake of greater emphasis upon the main plot and the resulting tightening of the texture, avoiding any risk of a splitting of interest. However, a secondary or subplot in the right hands – as we see it in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, or, for a modern instance, in Pinero's Sweet Lavender– is legitimate enough. Those who manipulate it with success will be careful to see that the minor plot shall never appear for a moment to be major; and that both strands shall be interwoven into an essential unity of design, which is admirably illustrated in Shakespeare's comedy just mentioned.

Have a theme then, let it be quite your own, and stick to it, is a succinct injunction which every dramatist will do well to heed and the critic in the seat will do well to demand. Neither one nor the other should ever forget that the one and only fundamental unity in drama, past, present and to come, is unity of idea, and the unity of action which gathers about that idea as surely as iron filings around the magnetized center. The unities of time and place are conditional upon the kind of drama aimed at, and the temporal and physical characteristic of the theater; the Greeks obeyed them for reasons peculiar to the Greeks, and many lands, beginning with the Romans, have imitated these so-called laws since. But Shakespeare destroyed them for England, and to-day, if unity of time and place are to be seen in an Ibsen play, it simply means that, in the psychological drama he writes, time and place are naturally restricted. But in the unity of action which means unity of theme we have a principle which looks to the constitution of the human mind; for the sake of that ease of attention which helps to hold interest and produce pleasure, such unity there must be; the mind of man (when he has one) is made that way.

There is a special reason why the intelligent play-goer must insist upon this fundamental unity: because much in our present imaginative literature is, as to form, in direct conflict with that appeal to a sustained effect of unity offered by a well-wrought drama. The short story that is all too brief, the vaudeville turn, the magazine habit of reading a host of unrelated scamped trifles, all militate against the habit of concentrated attention; all the more reason why it should be cultivated.

Let me return to the thought that the dramatist, in making the theme his own, may be tempted to present a view of life not only personal but eccentric and vagarious to the point of insanity.

His view, to put it bluntly, may represent a crack-brained distortion of life rather than life as it is experienced by men in general. In such a case, and obviously, his drama will be ineffective and objectionable, in the exact degree that it departs from what may be called broadly the normal and the possible. As I have already asserted, distortion for distortion, even a crazy handling of theme that is honest is to be preferred to one consciously a deflection from belief. But the former is not right because the latter is wrong. Both should be avoided, and will be if the play-maker be at the same time sincere and healthily representative in his reaction to life of humanity at large. The really great plays, and the good plays that have shown a lasting quality, have sinned in neither of these particulars.

It is especially of import that our critic-in-the-seat should insist on this matter of normal appeal, because ours happens to be a day when personal vagaries, extravagant theories and lawless imaginings are granted a freedom in literary and other art in general such as an earlier day hardly conceived of. The abuses under the mighty name of Art are many and flagrant. All the more need for the knowing spectator in the theater, or he who reads the play at home, to be prepared for his function, quick to reprimand alike tame subserviency or the abnormalities of unrestrained "genius." It is fair to say that absolute honesty on the dramatist's part in the conception and presentation of theme will meet all legitimate criticisms of his work. Within his limitations, we shall get the best that is in him, if he will only show us life as he sees it, and have the courage of his convictions, allowing no son of man to warp his work from that purpose.

CHAPTER VII

METHOD AND STRUCTURE

I

SO far we have considered the material of the dramatist, his theme and subject matter, and his attitude toward it. But his method in conceiving this material and of handling it is of great importance and we may now examine this a little in detail, to realize the peculiar problem that confronts him.

At the beginning let it be understood that the dramatist must see his subject dramatically. Every stage story should be seen or conceived in a central moment which is the explanation of the whole play, its reason for being. Without that moment, the drama could not exist; if the story were told, the plot unfolded without presenting that scene, the play would fall flat, nay, there would, strictly speaking, be no play there. That is why the French (leaders in nomenclature, as in all else dramatic) call it the scène à faire, the scene that one must do; or, to adopt the English equivalent offered by Mr. Archer in his interesting and able manual of stagecraft entitled Playmaking, the obligatory scene: that is, the scene one is obliged to show. This moment in the story is a climax, because it is the crowning result of all the preceding growth of the drama up to a point where the steadily increasing interest has reached its height and an electric effect of suspense and excitement results. This suspensive excitement depends upon the clash of human wills against each other or against circumstances; events are so tangled that they can be no further involved and something must happen in the way of cutting the knot; the fates of the persons are so implicated that their lives must be either saved or destroyed, in order to break the deadlock. Thus along with the clash goes a crisis presented in a breathless climactic effect which is the central and imperative scene of the piece, the backbone of every good play.

If this obligatory scene be absent, you may at once suspect the dramatist; whatever his other virtues (fine dialogue, excellent characterization, or still other merits), it is probable he is not one genuinely called to tell a story in the manner of drama within stage limitations.

It is sometimes said that a play is written backward. The remark has in mind this fundamental fact of the climax; all that goes before leads up to it, is preparation for it, and might conceivably be written after the obligatory scene has been conceived and shaped; all that comes after it is an attempt to retire gracefully from the great moment, rounding it out, showing its results, and conducting the spectator back to the common light of day in such a way as not to be dull, or conventional or anti-climactic. What follows this inevitable scene is (however disguised) at bottom a sort of bridge conveying the auditor from the supreme pleasure of the theater back to the rather humdrum experience of actual life; it is an experiment in gradation. And the prepared play-goer will deny the coveted award of well done to any play, albeit from famous hands and by no means wanting in good qualities, which nevertheless fails in this prime requisite of good drama: the central, dynamic scene illuminating all that goes before and follows after, without which the play, after all, has no right to existence.

With the coming of the modern psychologic school of which Galsworthy, Barker and Bennett are exemplars, there is a distinct tendency to minimize or even to eliminate this obligatory scene; an effort which should be carefully watched and remonstrated against; since it is the laying of an axe at the roots of dramatic writing. It may be confessed that in some instances the results of this violation of a cardinal principle are so charming as to blind the onlooker perhaps to the danger; as in the case of Milestones by Messrs. Bennett and Knoblauch, or The Pigeon by Galsworthy, or Louis Parker's Georgian picture, Pomander Walk. But this only confuses the issue. Such drama may prove delightful for other reasons; the thing to bear in mind is that they are such in spite of the giving up of the peculiar, quintessential merit of drama in its full sense. Their virtues are non-dramatic virtues, and they succeed, in so far as success awaits them, in spite of the violation of a principle, not because of it. They can be, and should be, heartily enjoyed, so long as this is plainly understood and the two accomplishments are perceived as separate. For it may be readily granted that a pleasant and profitable evening at the theater may be spent, without the very particular appeal which is dramatic coming into the experience at all. There are more things in the modern theater than drama; which is well, if we but make the discrimination.

But for the purposes of intelligent comprehension of what is drama, just that and naught else, the theater-goer will find it not amiss to hold fast to the idea that a play without its central scene hereinbefore described is not a play in the exact definition of that form of art, albeit ever so enjoyable entertainment. The history of drama in its failures and successes bears out the statement. And of all nations, France can be studied most profitably with this in mind, since the French have always been past masters in the feeling for the essentially dramatic, and centuries ago developed the skill to produce it. The fact that we get such a term as the scène à faire from them points to this truth.

Accepting the fact, then, that a play sound in conception and construction has and must have a central scene which acts as a centripetal force upon the whole drama, unifying and solidifying it, the next matter to consider is the subdivision of the play into acts and scenes. Since the whole story is shown before the footlights, scenes and acts are such divisions as shall best mark off and properly accentuate the stages of the story, as it is unfolded. Convention has had something to do with this arrangement and number, as we learn from a glance at the development of the stage story. The earlier English drama accepted the five-act division under classic influence, though the greatest dramatist of the past, Shakespeare, did so only half-heartedly, as may be realized by looking at the first complete edition of his plays, the First Folio of 1621. Hamlet, for instance, as there printed, gives the first two acts, and thereafter is innocent of any act division; and Romeo and Juliet has no such division at all. But with later editors, the classic tradition became more and more a convention and the student with the modernized text in hand has no reason to suspect the original facts. An old-fashioned work like Freitag's Technique of the Drama assumes this form as final and endeavors to study dramatic construction on that assumption.

The scenes, too, were many in the Elizabethan period, for the reason that there was no scene shifting in the modern sense; as many scenes might therefore be imagined as were desirable during the continuous performance. It has remained for modern technic to discover that there was nothing irrevocable about this fivefold division of acts; and that, in the attempt at a general simplification of play structure, we can do better by a reduction of them to three or four. Hence, five acts have shrunk to four or three; so that to-day the form preferred by the best dramatic artists, looking to Ibsen for leadership, is the three-act play, though the nature of the story often makes four desirable. A careful examination of the best plays within a decade will serve to show that this is definitely the tendency.

The three-act play, with its recognition that every art structure should have a beginning, middle and end – Aristotle's simple but profound observation on the tragedy of his day – might seem to be that which marks the ultimate technic of drama; yet it would be pedantic and foolish to deny that the simplification may proceed further still and two acts succeed three, or, further still, one act embrace the complete drama, thus returning to the "scene individable" of the Greeks and Shakespeare. Certainly, the whole evolution of form points that way.

But, whatever the final simplification, the play as a whole will present certain constructive problems; problems which confront the aim ever to secure, most economically and effectively, the desired dramatic result. The first of these is the problem of the opening act, which we may now examine in particular.

II

The first act has a definite aim and difficulties that belong to itself alone. Broadly speaking, its business is so to open the story as to leave the audience at the fall of the first curtain with a clear idea of what it is about; not knowing too much, wishing to know more, and having well in mind the antecedent conditions which made the story at its beginning possible. If, at the act's end, too much has been revealed, the interest projected forward sags; if too little, the audience fails to get the idea around which the story revolves, and so is not pleasurably anxious for its continuance. If the antecedent conditions have not clearly been made manifest, some omitted link may throw confusion upon all that follows. On the other hand, if too much time has been expended in setting forth the events that lead up to the story's start on the stage, with the rise of the curtain, not enough time may be left, within act limits, to hold the attention and fix interest so it may sustain the entr'act break and fasten upon the next act.

Thus it will be seen that a successful opening act is a considerable test of the dramatist's skill.

Another drawback complicates the matter. The playwright has at his disposal in the first act from half to three-quarters of an hour in which to effect his purpose. But he must lose from five to ten minutes of this precious time allotment, at the best very short, because, according to the detestable Anglo-Saxon convention, the audience is not fairly seated when the play begins, and general attention therefore not riveted upon the stage action. Under ideal conditions, and they have never existed in all respects in any time or country, the audience will be in place at the curtain's rise, alert to catch every word and movement. As a matter of fact, this practically never occurs; particularly in America, where the drama has never been taken so seriously as an art as music; for some time now people have not been allowed, in a hall devoted to that gentle sister art, to straggle in during the performance of a composition, or the self-exploitation of a singer, thereby disturbing the more enlightened hearers who have come on time, and regard it, very properly, as part of their breeding to do so. But in the theater, as we all know, the barbarous custom obtains of admitting late comers, so that for the first few minutes of the performance a steady insult is thus offered to the play, the players, and the portion of the audience already in their seats. It may be hoped, parenthetically, that as our theater gradually becomes civilized this survival of the manners of bushmen may become purely historic. At present, however, the practical playwright accepts the existing conditions, as perforce he must, and writes his play accordingly. And so the first few minutes of a well-constructed drama, it may be noticed, are generally devoted to some incident, interesting or amusing in itself, preferably external so as to catch the eye, but not too vital, and involving, as a rule, minor characters, without revealing anything really crucial in the action. The matter presented thus is not so much important as action that leads up to what is important; and its lack of importance must not be implied in too barefaced a way, lest attention be drawn to it. This part of the play marks time, and yet is by way of preparation for the entrance of the main character or characters.

Much skill is needed, and has been developed, in regard to the marshaling of the precedent conditions: to which the word exposition has been by common consent given. Exposition to-day is by no means what it was in Shakespeare's; indeed, it has been greatly refined and improved upon. In the earlier technic this prefatory material was introduced more frankly and openly in the shape of a prologue; or if the prologue was not used, at least the information was conveyed directly and at once to the audience by means of minor characters, stock figures like the servant or confidante, often employed mainly, or even solely, for that purpose. This made the device too obvious for modern taste, and such as to injure the illusion; the play lost its effect of presenting truthfully a piece of life, just when it was particularly important to seem such; that is, at the beginning. For with the coming of the subtler methods culminating in the deft technic of an Ibsen, which aims to draw ever closer to a real presentation of life on the stage, and so strove to find methods of depiction which should not obtrude artifice except when unavoidable, the stage artist has learned to interweave these antecedent circumstances with the story shown on the stage before the audience. And the result is that to-day the exposition of an Ibsen, a Shaw, a Wilde, a Pinero or a Jones is so managed as hardly to be detected save by the expert in stage mechanics. The intelligent play-goer will derive pleasure and profit from a study of Ibsen's growth in this respect; observing, for example, how much more deftly exposition is hidden in a late work like Hedda Gabler than in a comparatively early one like Pillars of Society; and, again, how bald and obvious was this master's technic in this respect when he began in the middle of the nineteenth century to write his historical plays.