Playlet

“ Though I stated the problems of all the playlets that were ever presented in vaudeville, the field of playlet-problem possibilities would not be even adequately suggested. Anything, everything, presents itself for a playlet problem—if you can make it human, interesting and alive.
What interests men and women? Everything, you answer. Whatever interests you and your family, and your neighbor and his family, and the man across the street and his wife's folks back home—is a subject for a playlet. ”

“ Now I must sound a warning against striving too hard after a surprise finish. The very nature of many playlets makes it impossible to give them such a curtain. If you have built up a story which touches the heart and brings tears to the eyes, and then turn it all into a joke, the chances are the audience will feel that their sympathies have been outraged, and so the playlet will fail. ”

“ Precisely as the character sketch is not a playlet, the merely narrative sketch is not a true playlet. No matter how interesting and momentarily amusing or thrilling may be the twenty-minute vaudeville offering that depends upon incident only, it does not enlist the attention, hold the sympathy, or linger in the memory, as does the playlet. ”

“ And now it may be of advantage to sum up what has been said about stage business in this chapter. We have seen how business may be used to condense the story of a playlet; how business is often—though not always—the very heart of the dramatic; how pantomime may be skillfully used to condense salient parts of the playlet story and illumine character; how business may be employed to break up a clumsy but necessarily long speech—thus sometimes saving a playlet from the failure of the tedious;—and why business is more productive of comedy than is dialogue. ”

“ Finally, if every other investigation has failed to develop the needed punch, go over your playlet again to see if it is possible that you have erred in the first principle of the art. If you have permitted even one tiny scene to creep in that does not hold a vital meaning to the single point of your climax, you have lost by so much the possibility of the punch. Remember, here, that a great playlet can be played without a single word being spoken and still be vividly clear to everyone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You should inquire of yourself first, "Is this a comedy or a serious playlet I am about to write?" And if the latter, "Should I write a serious playlet?"
One of vaudeville's keenest observers, Sime Silverman, editor of Variety, said when we were discussing this point: "Nobody ought to write a tragic or even a serious playlet who can write anything else. There are two or three reasons why. First, vaudeville likes laughter, and while it may be made to like tears, a teary playlet must be exceedingly well done to win. ”

“ If your playlet is a comedy, make it a comedy throughout; it if is a deeply human story, let it end as it began; [1] if you are writing a straight drama or a melodrama, keep your playlet straight drama or melodrama all the way through. Go over your playlet with the eye of a relentless critic and make sure that you have not mixed your genres, which only in the rarest cases can be done effectively. ”

“ A Playlet is a stage narrative taking usually about twenty minutes to act, having a single chief character, and a single problem which predominates, and is developed by means of a plot so compressed and so organized that every speech and every action of the characters move it forward to a finish which presents the most striking features ”

“ While it is possible to write a most enthralling novel of mystery or a detective short-story which suddenly, at the very last moment, may disclose the trick by which it has all been built up, such a thing is not successfully possible in a playlet. You must not conceal the identity of anyone of your characters from the audience. Conceal his identity from every other character and you may construct a fine playlet, but don't conceal his motive from the audience. ”

“ IV. HOW A PLAYLET WRITER RECOGNIZES A PLAYLET IDEA A playlet writer recognizes that the character or characters, the incident or incidents, possess a funny, serious or tragic grip, and the fact that he, himself, is gripped, is evidence that a playlet is "there," if—IF—he can trust his own dramatic instinct. A playlet writer recognizes an idea as a playlet idea, because he is able so to recognize such an idea ”

“ And now, let us sum up this brief discussion of characters and characterization before we pass on to a consideration of dialogue. Because of time-restriction, a playlet must depend for interest upon plot rather than upon character. The average number of persons in a playlet is four. Interesting characters are to be found everywhere, and the playlet writer can delineate those he rubs elbows with better than those he does not know well and therefore cannot fully understand. The same unity demanded of a plot is required of a character—characters must be consistent. ”

“ The average "playlet"—atrocious word—in the variety theatres is a dreadful thing, crude, obvious, often sensational or sentimental, usually very badly acted at least in the minor recircles, and still more a frank padding, a thing of the footlights, than the afterpiece of our parents. It has been frequently said by those optimists who are forever discovering the birth of the arts in popular amusements that vaudeville audiences will appreciate and applaud the best. ”

“ It is not at all uncommon for a playlet writer to be asked to fit some legitimate star, about to enter vaudeville, with a playlet that shall have for its hero or its heroine the particular character in which the star has had marked success. [1] And often a man and wife who have achieved a reputation in vaudeville together will order a new playlet that shall have characters modeled on the lines of those in the old playlet. ”

“ Yet it is permissible for a writer to give his playlet more than one place of happening—if he can make his story so compact and gripping that it does not lose in effect by the unavoidable few seconds' wait necessary to the changing of the scenery. But, even if his playlet is so big and dramatic that it admits of a change of scenes, he must conform it to the obvious vaudeville necessity of scenic alternation. [2] With this scenic "rule" the matter of unity of place in the playlet turns to the question of a playwright's art, which rules cannot limit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Edgar Allan Woolf's fine satirical comedy to be found in the Appendix.
[2] As a side light, you see how a playlet theme differs from a playlet plot. You will recall that in the chapter on "The Germ Idea," the theme of The Lollard was thus stated in terms of a playlet problem: "A foolish young woman may leave her husband because she has 'found him out,' yet return to him when she discovers that another man is no better than he is." ”

“ The very nature of the playlet makes it the more difficult to achieve dramatic effect the more the number of characters is reduced. But while four persons are perfectly permissible in a playlet designed for vaudeville's commercial stage, the beginner would do well to make absolutely sure that he has reduced his characters to their lowest number before he markets his playlet, and, if possible, make a three-person or a two-person offering. ”

“ Except in rare instances a playlet should deal with a story that requires but one set of scenery, thus conserving the necessities of commercial vaudeville, aiding the smooth running of a performance, and preserving the dramatic unity of place. ”

“ As the playlet is primarily action, and as the audience expects the playlet to keep moving all the time, it is a common practise to try to trick the audience into believing every speech is vibrant with emotional force, by keeping the actors moving about the stage. But the fact that a really vital speech may be killed by a movement which distracts the attention of the audience ought to be proof positive that needless movements about the stage are merely a confession of poverty in the playlet. ”

“ Yet there will be found still fewer dramatic offerings in vaudeville that do not conform to some of these principles. Such near-playlets succeed not because they evade the type, but mysteriously in spite of their mistakes. And as they conform more closely to the standards of what a playlet should be, they approach the elements that make for lasting success. ”

“ Rodney Harrison, who knows everybody who is anybody, has introduced me to some vaudeville-powers-that-be and I am encouraged to try my hand at what they call a sketch—a one-act play. It seems that they are in need of something a little less thin than the usual article they've been serving up to their patrons,—more of a playlet ”

“ And then the actor didn't know if he was a nickel in or a nickel out."
This brought forth more applause, and Shadow continued to tell one story or joke after another, in rapid succession, until the entire audience was roaring. When he made his bow and disappeared behind a side curtain his monologue was voted by all one of the hits of the evening.
"It was all right," said Dave. "I only hope our playlet goes as well." ”

“ While you must have wordless pantomime at the basis of every play, it is those plays which exhibit in high degree the use of action in the form of dialogue that are the more comfortable reading; and, always postulating that a play is a play—not necessarily a playwright's play, the admiration of his brother craftsmen, but a thing practicable, actable and effective on the stage—the more physical action is subordinated to character, to the exploration of the springs of human motive, the better it is for reading purposes and the better for all purposes. ”

“ The method of the ballet's action is simple enough. The music is left to tell the story, and, punctual to the comencement of every theme, the appropriate character comes flitting on to the stage, to dance its little pas and then flit off again to make way for the next. The stage setting is as empty and dignified as a musical stave, and the little figures hurry across it, singly or in groups, almost like musical notation come to life and colour. ”

“ Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the settee, or vice versa? There is no doubt that furniture, properties, accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the early-Victorian stage. ”

“ Of all the delightful games which children play in the nursery or in the schoolroom, perhaps the favourite one is dressing-up, and acting. And of all the Christmas treats, perhaps the best is going to the theatre—either to the pantomime or to one of the fairy plays which fortunate children can now enjoy.
There are grown-up people too who never get tired of dressing-up and acting, nor of going to the theatre to see other people act. It is a taste which is shared by children and grown-up people alike. ”

“ But every child possesses it, whether bred in the whispering wood or among sweetstuff shops and the Highbury 'buses; and I, for one, recognized it immediately this lovely child carried it over the footlights of the Lyceum Theatre.
Hither and thither she drifted like a white snowflake, but all the time ... dancing; and one had a sense of dumb amazement that so frail a child, her fair arms and legs as slender as a flower-stem, should so fill that stage and hold the rapt attention of a theatreful of people. Here was evidence of something stronger than mere mastery of ballet technique. ”

“ From the Illustrated London News, December 24, 1853.
[193] The young woman of this picture is a “high-kicker” who evidently has made a hit with the audience at a modern Christmas ballet. When she gets behind the scenes among “properties” left over from the ancient days, she gives a frisky vent to her feelings by flashing her heels in the faces of the grinning old masks.
In short, she represents pantomime in its most modern development, the ballet, as contrasted with the grotesque humors of the past. ”

“ Another class of repetitions, which we may call imitations, also frequent on the comic stage, seems in like manner to reproduce easily recognisable features of child’s play. Nothing is more characteristic of the play-mood in young animals and in children alike than an imitative {349} propagation of movement. The child’s game of making faces is an excellent example. The liking of the stage for these imitations shows how closely it remains in touch with primitive fun. This is plain enough when the action imitated is disorderly, as we may see in the rebuffs and counter-rebuffs of the circus. ”