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.