We, the audience, must follow each step of a play with full belief in that step, but where the dramatist’s skill comes in is in being able to make of himself such a glamorous and subtle liar that what he feels to be true becomes the truth. It is the same with any of the arts of the theater; our skillfully placed lamps give us a feeling of sunlight, but they are not the sun. The great actor doesn’t die before your eyes, but he seems to die, just as he doesn’t live, he only seems to live. For a while, here in America, we playwrights fell very much under the Russian influence and rather wandered about in a fog. “Why?” we asked, “should this play be a failure? Isn’t it true?” The answer was of course that the probability is that if it had not been quite so laboriously true it wouldn’t have been quite such a bore. Bad smells are true, rainbows are lies. No man has ever put wisdom into simple and understandable words better than Shakespeare did and Hamlet’s advice to the players remains a marvelous guide both to the actor and the dramatist. “Hold the mirror up to nature” but show it reflected—a mirage.
OWEN DAVIS, JR.
Actor
(Photograph by Underwood & Underwood, Chicago)
DONALD DAVIS
Playwright
(Photograph by White Studio)
12. I have often been asked what was the most valuable trait in the equipment of the dramatist and I always answer, “Courage.” I put that ahead of everything but genius, and genius is to me just an expression, like “plovers’ eggs.” I’ve often read of “plovers’ eggs,” but up to now I’ve never eaten any. I think I know personally all of the dramatists of America and many of the best of England. I am sure that there are more able and talented men and women writing for the stage to-day than ever before, but Eugene O’Neill is the only one I know with what I would admit to be genius. I don’t always like Mr. O’Neill’s plays and I never like all of any of them, but there is always something under them that the rest of us don’t get. To me he is a mile above the rest of us.
Sidney Howard, Max Anderson and, in melodrama, Bayard Veiller know their business better than he does, but O’Neill’s plays come from deeper down, not deeper in his brain as some people think, but from the depths of the particularly sensitive heart of a particularly sensitive man. So, leaving genius aside, I think courage the quality most valuable to the man or woman who expects to win a place in the very odd world of the theater where there are no standards at all, either mental, moral or ethical, and where the author must of necessity stand alone against groups with different and antagonistic interests. From the moment an author signs a contract for the production of a play until that play has lived its life on the stage, gone through its course of stock company and foreign productions and been sold “down the river” and turned into a moving picture, every single hand that comes in contact with that play is the hand of a potential enemy. The manager and his staff, the actors in a group, the scenic artists and the technical departments all have the power and as a rule they desire to put in a little something by way of change, something usually that will be to their advantage and destructive to the best quality of the work.
This of course means fight. An author surely might as well fight and be licked as to be licked without fighting, and the method adopted by the experienced street fighter of getting in the first punch is most earnestly recommended. There is to all these groups but one real hope in any play—the hope that the author wrote something; if he did, they all, manager, actor, etc., have a chance for success; if he didn’t they haven’t. Authors of plays, like dentists, are never popular; nobody really likes to have them around.
Writers are so different in their method that I hesitate to advise a course that has been very useful to me, that is to vary the form of writing often enough to escape the boredom that follows walking over the same path too frequently. I like to follow a heavy drama with a farce, and a light comedy with a melodrama. Of course, one man usually writes one form of play better than he does another; yet even in an age of specialists, the good marksman should learn to handle all the tools of his trade, and no man can write deep drama without a sense of comedy, and most assuredly can’t write farce without a definite note of tragedy.
I have always had a lot of fun writing mystery plays, although a well-built mystery drama represents a staggering amount of hard work. The formula is a very exact and very exacting one, and in addition to its mechanical difficulties the author must not only create an interest in who committed the crime, but, if he hopes for success, he must make them fear that some one character dear to them is guilty. In other words, the mystery play in which one hasn’t gone deep enough into the emotions to make the audience care who committed the murder is never successful, no matter how mysterious it may be.