A mere sequence of events is not a plot; to become a plot there must develop a crisis or entanglement due to a conflict of the characters' wills; the entanglement must be of such importance that when it is untangled the characters will be in a different relation to each other—changed in themselves by the crisis. A plot is divided into three parts: a Beginning, a Middle and an Ending. The Beginning must state the premises of the playlet's problem clearly and simply; the Middle must develop the problem logically and solve the entanglement in a "big" scene, and the Ending must round out the whole satisfyingly—with a surprise, if fitting. A plot, furthermore, must be so constructed that the removal of anyone of its component parts will be detrimental to the whole. It is told best when its action occurs in continuous time of about the length the episode would take to occur in real life and does not require the changing of scenery. Thus will a playlet be made to give the singleness of effect that is the height of playlet art.
CHAPTER XV
THE CHARACTERS IN THE PLAYLET
In this chapter the single word "character" must, of necessity, do duty to express three different things. First, by "characters," as used in the title, I mean what the programs sometimes more clearly express by the words "persons of the play." Second, in the singular, it must connote what we all feel when we use the word in everyday life, as "he is a man of—good or bad—character." And third, and also in the singular, I would also have it connote, in the argot of the stage, "a character actor," meaning one who presents a distinct type—as, say, a German character, or a French character. It is because of the suggestive advantage of having one word to express these various things that the single term "characters" is used as the title of this chapter. But, that there may be no possible confusion, I shall segregate the different meanings sharply.
I. CHARACTERS VERSUS PLOT
In discussing how a playwright gets an idea, you will recall, we found that there are two chief ways of fashioning the playlet: First, a plot may be fitted with characters; second, characters may be fitted with a plot. In other words, the plot may be made most prominent, or the characters may be made to stand out above the story. You will also remember we found that the stage—the vaudeville quite as much as the legitimate—is "character-ridden," that is, an actor who has made a pronounced success in the delineation of one character type forever afterward wants another play or playlet "just like the last, but with a different plot," so that he can go right on playing the same old character. This we saw has in some cases resulted in the story being considered merely as a vehicle for a personality, often to the detriment of the playlet. Naturally, this leads us to inquire: is there not some just balance between characters and plot which should be preserved?
Were we considering merely dramatic theory, we would be perfectly right in saying that no play should be divisible into plot and characters, but that story and characters should be so closely twinned that one would be unthinkable without the other. As Brander Matthews says, "In every really important play the characters make the plot, and the story is what it is merely because the characters are what they are." An exceptionally fine vaudeville example—one only, it is agreeable to note, out of many that might be quoted from vaudeville's past and present—that has but two persons in the playlet is Will Cressy's "The Village Lawyer." One is a penniless old lawyer who has been saving for years to buy a clarionet. A woman comes in quest of a divorce. When he has listened to her story he asks twenty dollars advance fee. Then he persuades her to go back home—and hands the money back. There is a splendid climax. The old lawyer stands in the doorway of his shabby office looking out into the night. "Well," he sighs, "maybe I couldn't play the darned thing anyway!" If the lawyer had not been just what he was there would have been no playlet. But vital as the indissoluble union of plot and characters is in theory, we are not discussing theory; we are investigating practice, and practice from the beginner's standpoint, therefore let us approach the answer to our question in this way:
When you were a child clamoring for "a story" you did not care a snap of your fingers about anything except "Once upon a time there was a little boy—or a giant—or a dragon," who did something. You didn't care what the character was, but whatever it was, it had to do something, to be doing something all of the time. Even when you grew to youth and were on entertainment bent, you cared not so much what the characters in a story were, just so long as they kept on doing something—preferably "great" deeds, such as capturing a city or scuttling a ship or falling in love. It was only a little later that you came to find enjoyment in reading a book or seeing a play in which the chief interest came from some person who had admirable qualities or was an odd sort of person who talked in an odd sort of way. Was it George Cohan who said "a vaudeville audience is of the mental age of a nine-year-old child"?
Theoretically and, of course, practically too, when it is possible, the characters of a playlet should be as interesting as the plot. Each should vitally depend upon the other. But, if you must choose whether to sacrifice plot-interest or character-interest, save the interest of plot every time. As Aristotle says, "the action is the first and most important thing, the characters only secondary."
How a playwright begins to construct a play, whether he fits a plot with characters, or fits characters with a plot, does not matter. What matters is how he ends. If the story and the characters blend perfectly the result is an example of the highest art, but characters alone will never make a stage story—the playlet writer must end with plot. Story is for what the stage is made. Plot is the life blood of the playlet. To vivify cold dramatic incidents is the province of playlet characters.