(b) Witty Dialogue that fences with love, that thrusts, parries and—surrenders, is what makes the flirtation two-act "get over." It is the same kind of dialogue that made Anthony Hope's "Dolly Dialogues" so successful in their day, the sort of speeches which we, in real life, think of afterward and wish we had made.
(c) Daintiness of effect is what is needed in this form of two-act. Dialogue and business, scenery, lights and music all combine to the fulfillment of its purpose. The cruder touches of other two-act forms are forgotten and the entire effort is concentrated on making an appeal to the "ideal." Turn to the Appendix, and read "After the Shower," and you will see how these various elements are unified. This famous flirtation two-act has been chosen because it shows practically all the elements we have discussed.
CHAPTER X
THE PLAYLET AS A UNIQUE DRAMATIC FORM
The playlet is a very definite thing—and yet it is difficult to define. Like the short-story, painting as we know it today, photography, the incandescent lamp, the telephone, and the myriad other forms of art and mechanical conveniences, the playlet did not spring from an inventor's mind full fledged, but attained its present form by slow growth. It is a thing of life—and life cannot be bounded by words, lest it be buried in the tomb of a hasty definition.
To attempt even the most cautious of definitions without having first laid down the foundations of understanding by describing some of the near-playlet forms to be seen on many vaudeville bills would, indeed, be futile. For perhaps the surest way of learning what a thing is, is first to learn what it is not. Confusion is then less likely to creep into the conception, and the definition comes like a satisfactory summing up of familiar points that are resolved into clear words.
I. NEAR-DRAMATIC FORMS WHICH PRECEDED THE VAUDEVILLE PLAYLET
Even in the old music hall days, when a patron strolled in from a hard day's work and sat down to enjoy an even harder evening's entertainment, the skit or sketch or short play which eventually drifted upon the boards—where it was seen through the mists of tobacco smoke and strong drink—was the thing. The admiration the patrons had for the performers, whom they liberally treated after the show, did not prevent them from actively driving from the stage any offering that did not possess the required dramatic "punch." [1] They had enjoyed the best of everything else the music hall manager could obtain for their amusement and they demanded that their bit of a play be, also, the very best of its kind.
[1] It is worthy of note in this connection that many of the dramatic and particularly the comedy offerings seen in the music halls of twenty years ago, and in the "Honkitonks" of Seattle and other Pacific Coast cities during the Alaskan gold rush, have, expurgated, furnished the scenarios of a score of the most successful legitimate dramas and comedies of recent years. Some of our greatest legitimate and vaudeville performers also came from this humble and not-to-be-boasted-of school. This phase of the growth of the American drama has never been written. It should be recorded while the memories of "old timers" are still fresh.
No matter what this form of entertainment that we now know by the name of vaudeville may be called, the very essence of its being is variety. "Topical songs"—we call their descendants "popular songs"—classic ballads, short concerts given on all sorts of instruments, juggling, legerdermain, clowning, feats of balancing, all the departments of dancing and of acrobatic work, musical comedy, pantomime, and all the other hundred-and-one things that may be turned into an amusing ten or twenty minutes, found eager welcome on the one stage that made it, and still makes it, a business to present the very newest and the very best of everything. To complete its claim to the title of variety, to separate itself from a likeness to the circus, to establish itself as blood brother of the legitimate stage, and, most important of all, to satisfy the craving of its audiences for drama, vaudeville tried many forms of the short play before the playlet was evolved to fill the want.