Willard Mack—who developed into a successful legitimate playwright from vaudeville, and is best known, perhaps, for the expansion of his vaudeville act, "Kick in," into the long play of the same name—has this to say on the subject: "I say to the ambitious playwright, take the types you are familiar with. Why go to the Northwest, to New Orleans in the 40's, to the court of Louis XIV, for characters? The milkman who comes to your door in the morning, the motorman on the passing street car, the taxi driver, all have their human-interest stories. Anyone of them would make a drama. I never attempt to write anything that has not suggested itself from something in real life. I must know it has existed." [1]
[1] Willard Mack on the "Vaudeville Playlet," The New York Dramatic Mirror, March 3, 1915.
Precisely as it is impossible to tell anyone how to grasp the dramatic and transplant it into a playlet, is it impossible to show how to seize on character and transplant it to the stage. Only remember that interesting characters are all about you, and you will have little difficulty—if you have, as the French say, the "flare."
III. FITTING CHARACTERS TO PLOT
It would seem that a playwright who has his plot all thought out would experience little difficulty in fitting the characters of a playlet into their waiting niches; it is easy, true enough—if his plot is perfectly dovetailed and motivated as to character. By this I mean, that in even a playlet in which plot rides the characters, driving them at its will to attain its end, logic must be used. And it certainly would not be logical to make your characters do anything which such persons would not do in real life. As there must be unity in plot, so must there be unity in character.
The persons in a playlet are not merely puppets, even if plot is made to predominate. They are—let us hope—live persons. I do not mean that you have transplanted living people to the stage, but that you have taken the elements of character that you require out of life and have combined these into a consistent whole to form characters necessary to your playlet. Therefore, you must be careful to make each character uniform throughout. You must not demand of any character anything you have not laid down in the premises of your problem—which presupposes that each character possesses certain definite and logical characteristics which make the plot what it is.
Bearing this single requirement firmly in mind, you must so motivate your plot that everything which occurs to a character rises out of that character's personality; you must make the crisis the outward evidence of his inner being and the change which comes through the climax the result of inner change. This was considered in the chapters on the dramatic and on plot construction and expressed when I said: It is the meaning hidden in the events that makes the dramatic. It is this inner meaning that lies in the soul of the character himself which marks the change in his own character and his own outward life.
IV. CHARACTERIZATION
How a playwright delineates character in the persons of his playlet, is at once the easiest thing to explain and the most difficult for which to lay down helpful methods, for while the novelist and the short-story writer have three ways of telling their readers what manner of man it is in whom he asks interest, the dramatist has but two.
1. Methods of Characterization