The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II
Page 22
Suddenly Apollo starts singing his invocation to the Muses:)
Mnemosyne, mother of the nine;
Polyhymnia, incense of the gods—
LACHESIS (Shrieks): Don’t sing! Unfair! How can we think?
CLOTHO: Stop your ears, Sister.
ATROPOS: Unfair! (Murmuring) What is it that can save every life—(They put their fingers in their ears)
APOLLO:
Erato, voice of love;
Euterpe, help me now.
Calliope, thief of our souls;
Urania, clothed of the stars;
Clio of the backward glances;
Euterpe, help me now.
Terpsichore of the beautiful ankles;
Thalia of long laughter;
Melpomene, dreaded and welcome;
Euterpe, help me now.
(Then in a loud voice) Forfeit! Forfeit!
(Clotho and Atropos bury their faces in Lachesis’s neck, moaning.)
LACHESIS (In a dying voice): What is the answer?
APOLLO (Flinging away his hat, triumphantly): Myself! Apollo the sun.
SISTERS: Apollo! You?
LACHESIS (Savagely): Pah! What life can you save?
APOLLO: My forfeit! One wish! One life! The life of Admetus, King of Thessaly.
(A horrified clamor arises from the Sisters.)
SISTERS: Fraud! Impossible! Not to be thought of!
APOLLO: By Acheron.
SISTERS: Against all law. Zeus will judge. Fraud.
APOLLO (Warning): By Acheron.
SISTERS: Zeus! We will go to Zeus about it. He will decide.
APOLLO: Zeus swears by Acheron and keeps his oath.
(Sudden silence.)
ATROPOS (Decisive but ominous): You will have your wish—the life of King Admetus. But—
APOLLO (Triumphantly): I shall have the life of Admetus!
SISTERS: But—
APOLLO: I shall have the life of Admetus! What is your but?
ATROPOS: Someone else must die in his stead.
APOLLO (Lightly): Oh—choose some slave. Some gray and greasy thread on your lap, divine Lachesis.
LACHESIS (Outraged): What? You ask me to take a life?
ATROPOS: You ask us to murder?
CLOTHO: Apollo thinks that we are criminals?
APOLLO (Beginning to be fearful): Then, great Sisters, how is this to be done?
LACHESIS: Me—an assassin? (She spreads her arms wide and says solemnly) Over my left hand is Chance; over my right hand is Necessity.
APOLLO: Then, gracious Sisters, how will this be done?
LACHESIS: Someone must give his life for Admetus—of free choice and will. Over such deaths we have no control. Neither Chance nor Necessity rules the free offering of the will. Someone must choose to die in the place of Admetus, King of Thessaly.
APOLLO (Covering his face with his hands): No! No! I see it all! (With a loud cry) Alcestis! Alcestis! (And he runs stumbling from the scene)
END OF PLAY
Some Thoughts on Playwriting
“SOME THOUGHTS ON PLAYWRITING,” published originally in 1941, was the work of an internationally acclaimed author who had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) and drama (Our Town), and was soon to win a third for his play, The Skin of Our Teeth. Something of the author’s great success in the classroom and on the lecture circuit is also present in the essay’s didacticism. Not long before writing this piece, Wilder had added still another level of theatrical experience to his résumé: for several weeks he had played the role of the Stage Manager in the original Broadway production of Our Town.
SOME THOUGHTS ON PLAYWRITING
by Thornton Wilder
This essay first appeared as a contribution to The Intent of the Artist, Augusto Centeno, ed., Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1941. It was republished in American Characteristics and Other Essays, the collection of twenty-eight of Wilder’s essays, tributes and research papers, edited by Donald Gallup, and published by Harper & Row in 1979.
FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS of the drama separate it from the other arts. Each of these conditions has its advantages and disadvantages, each requires a particular aptitude from the dramatist, and from each there are a number of instructive consequences to be derived. These conditions are:
I.The theatre is an art which reposes upon the work of many collaborators;
II.It is addressed to the group-mind;
III.It is based upon a pretense and its very nature calls out a multiplication of pretenses;
IV.Its action takes place in a perpetual present time.
I
THE THEATRE IS AN ART WHICH REPOSES UPON THE WORK OF MANY COLLABORATORS
We have been accustomed to think that a work of art is by definition the product of one governing selecting will. A landscape by Cézanne consists of thousands of brush-strokes each commanded by one mind. Paradise Lost and Pride and Prejudice, even in cheap frayed copies, bear the immediate and exclusive message of one intelligence. It is true that in musical performance we meet with intervening executants, but the element of intervention is slight compared to that which takes place in drama. Illustrations:
1.One of the finest productions of The Merchant of Venice in our time showed Sir Henry Irving as Shylock, a noble, wronged, and indignant being, of such stature that the merchants of Venice dwindled before him into irresponsible schoolboys. He was confronted in court by a gracious, even queenly Portia, Miss Ellen Terry. At the Odéon in Paris, however, Gémier played Shylock as a vengeful and hysterical buffoon, confronted in court by a Portia who was a gamine from the Paris streets with a lawyer’s quill three feet long over her ear; at the close of the trial scene Shylock was driven screaming about the auditorium, behind the spectators’ backs and onto the stage again, in a wild Elizabethan revel. Yet for all their divergencies both were admirable productions of the play.
2.If there was ever a play in which fidelity to the author’s requirements was essential in the representation of the principal role, it would seem to be Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for the play is primarily an exposition of her character, Ibsen’s directions read:
Enter from the left Hedda Gabler. She is a woman of twenty-nine. Her face and figure show great refinement and distinction. Her complexion is pale and opaque. Her steel gray eyes express an unruffled calm. Her hair is of an attractive medium brown, but is not particularly abundant; and she is dressed in a flowing loose-fitting morning gown.
I once saw Eleonora Duse in this role. She was a woman of sixty and made no effort to conceal it. Her complexion was pale and transparent. Her hair was white, and she was dressed in a gown that suggested some medieval empress in mourning. And the performance was very fine.
One may well ask: Why write for the theatre at all? Why not work in the novel, where such deviations from one’s intentions cannot take place?
There are two answers:
1.The theatre presents certain vitalities of its own so inviting and stimulating that the writer is willing to receive them in compensation for this inevitable variation from an exact image.
2.The dramatist through working in the theatre gradually learns not merely to take account of the presence of the collaborators, but to derive advantage from them; and he learns, above all, to organize the play in such a way that its strength lies not in appearances beyond his control, but in the succession of events and in the unfolding of an idea, in narration.
The gathered audience sits in a darkened room, one end of which is lighted. The nature of the transaction at which it is gazing is a succession of events illustrating a general idea—the stirring of the idea; the gradual feeding out of information; the shock and countershock of circumstances; the flow of action; the interruption of action; the moments of allusion to earlier events; the preparation of surprise, dread or delight—all that is the author’s and his alone.
For reasons to be discussed later—the expectancy of the group-mind, the problem of time on the stage, the absence
of the narrator, the element of pretense—the theatre carries the art of narration to a higher power than the novel or the epic poem. The theatre is unfolding action and in the disposition of events the authors may exercise a governance so complete that the distortions effected by the physical appearance of actors, by the fancies of scene painters, and the misunderstandings of directors, fall into relative insignificance. It is just because the theatre is an art of many collaborators, with the constant danger of grave misinterpretation, that the dramatist learns to turn his attention to the laws of narration, its logic, and its deep necessity of presenting a unifying idea stronger than its mere collection of happenings. The dramatist must be by instinct a storyteller.
There is something mysterious about the endowment of the storyteller. Some very great writers possessed very little of it, and some others, lightly esteemed, possessed it in so large a measure that their books survive down the ages, to the confusion of severer critics. Alexandre Dumas had it to an extraordinary degree; while Melville, for all his splendid quality, had it barely sufficiently to raise his work from the realm of nonfiction. It springs, not, as some have said, from an aversion to general ideas, but from an instinctive coupling of idea and illustration; the idea, for a born storyteller, can only be expressed imbedded in its circumstantial illustration. The myth, the parable, the fable are the fountainhead of all fiction and in them is seen most clearly the didactic, moralizing employment of a story. Modern taste shrinks from emphasizing the central idea that hides behind the fiction, but it exists there nevertheless, supplying the unity to fantasizing, and offering a justification to what otherwise we would repudiate as mere arbitrary contrivance, pretentious lying, or individualistic emotional association-spinning. For all their magnificent intellectual endowment, George Meredith and George Eliot were not born storytellers; they chose fiction as the vehicle for their reflections, and the passing of time is revealing their error in that choice. Jane Austen was pure storyteller and her works are outlasting those of apparently more formidable rivals. The theatre is more exacting than the novel in regard to this faculty and its presence constitutes a force which compensates the dramatist for the deviations which are introduced into his work by the presence of his collaborators.
The chief of these collaborators are the actors.
The actor’s gift is a combination of three separate faculties or endowments. Their presence to a high degree in any one person is extremely rare, although the ambition to possess them is common. Those who rise to the height of the profession represent a selection and a struggle for survival in one of the most difficult and cruel of the artistic activities. The three endowments that compose the gift are observation, imagination and physical coordination.
1.An observant and analyzing eye for all modes of behavior about us, for dress and manner, and for the signs of thought and emotion in oneself and in others.
2.The strength of imagination and memory whereby the actor may, at the indication in the author’s text, explore his store of observations and represent the details of appearance and the intensity of the emotions—joy, fear, surprise, grief, love and hatred—and through imagination extend them to intenser degrees and to differing characterizations.
3.A physical coordination whereby the force of these inner realizations may be communicated to voice, face and body.
An actor must know the appearances and the mental states; he must apply his knowledge to the role; and he must physically express his knowledge. Moreover, his concentration must be so great that he can effect this representation under conditions of peculiar difficulty—in abrupt transition from the nonimaginative conditions behind the stage; and in the presence of fellow actors who may be momentarily destroying the reality of the action.
A dramatist prepares the characterization of his personages in such a way that it will take advantage of the actor’s gift.
Characterization in a novel is presented by the author’s dogmatic assertion that the personage was such, and by an analysis of the personage with generally an account of his or her past. Since in the drama this is replaced by the actual presence of the personage before us and since there is no occasion for the intervening all-knowing author to instruct us as to his or her inner nature, a far greater share is given in a play to (1) highly characteristic utterances and (2) concrete occasions in which the character defines itself under action and (3) a conscious preparation of the text whereby the actor may build upon the suggestions in the role according to his own abilities.
Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in—not entirely blank, for a number of indications of individuality are already there, but to a far less definite and absolute degree than in the novel.
The dramatist’s principal interest being the movement of the story, he is willing to resign the more detailed aspects of characterization to the actor and is often rewarded beyond his expectation.
The sleepwalking scene from Macbeth is a highly compressed selection of words whereby despair and remorse rise to the surface of indirect confession. It is to be assumed that had Shakespeare lived to see what the genius of Sarah Siddons could pour into the scene from that combination of observation, self-knowledge, imagination and representational skill, even he might have exclaimed, “I never knew I wrote so well!”
II
THE THEATRE IS AN ART ADDRESSED TO A GROUP-MIND
Painting, sculpture and the literature of the book are certainly solitary experiences; and it is likely that most people would agree that the audience seated shoulder to shoulder in a concert hall is not an essential element in musical enjoyment.
But a play presupposes a crowd. The reasons for this go deeper than (1) the economic necessity for the support of the play and (2) the fact that the temperament of actors is proverbially dependent on group attention.
It rests on the fact that (1) the pretense, the fiction, on the stage would fall to pieces and absurdity without the support accorded to it by the crowd and (2) the excitement induced by pretending a fragment of life is such that it partakes of ritual and festival, and requires a throng.
Similarly, the fiction that royal personages are of a mysteriously different nature from other people requires audiences, levees and processions for its maintenance. Since the beginnings of society, satirists have occupied themselves with the descriptions of kings and queens in their intimacy and delighted in showing how the prerogatives of royalty become absurd when the crowd is not present to extend to them the enhancement of an imaginative awe.
The theatre partakes of the nature of festival. Life imitated is life raised to a higher power. In the case of comedy, the vitality of these pretended surprises, deceptions and contretemps becomes so lively that before a spectator, solitary or regarding himself as solitary, the structure of so much event would inevitably expose the artificiality of the attempt and ring hollow and unjustified; and in the case of tragedy, the accumulation of woe and apprehension would soon fall short of conviction. All actors know the disturbing sensation of playing before a handful of spectators at a dress rehearsal or performance where only their interest in pure craftsmanship can barely sustain them. During the last rehearsals the phrase is often heard: “This play is hungry for an audience.”
Since the theatre is directed to a group-mind, a number of consequences follow:
1.A group-mind presupposes, if not a lowering of standards, a broadening of the fields of interest. The other arts may presuppose an audience of connoisseurs trained in leisure and capable of being interested in certain rarefied aspects of life. The dramatist may be prevented from exhibiting, for example, detailed representations of certain moments in history that require specialized knowledge in the audience, or psychological states in the personages which are of insufficient general interest to evoke self-identification in the majority. In the Second Part of Goethe’s Faust there are long passages dealing with the theory of paper money. The exposition of the nature of misanthropy (so much mor
e drastic than Molière’s) in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens has never been a success. The dramatist accepts this limitation in subject matter and realizes that the group-mind imposes upon him the necessity of treating material understandable by the larger number.
2.It is the presence of the group-mind that brings another requirement to the theatre—forward movement.
Maeterlinck said that there was more drama in the spectacle of an old man seated by a table than in the majority of plays offered to the public. He was juggling with the various meanings in the word “drama.” In the sense whereby drama means the intensified concentration of life’s diversity and significance he may well have been right; if he meant drama as a theatrical representation before an audience, he was wrong. Drama on the stage is inseparable from forward movement, from action.
Many attempts have been made to present Plato’s dialogues, Gobineau’s fine series of dialogues, La Renaissance, and the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, but without success. Through some ingredient in the group-mind, and through the sheer weight of anticipation involved in the dressing-up and the assumption of fictional roles, an action is required, and an action that is more than a mere progress in argumentation and debate.
III
THE THEATRE IS A WORLD OF PRETENSE
It lives by conventions: a convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.
Illustrations: Consider at the first performance of Medea, the passage where Medea meditates the murder of her children. An anecdote from antiquity tells us that the audience was so moved by this passage that considerable disturbance took place.
The following conventions were involved:
1.Medea was played by a man.
2.He wore a large mask on his face. In the lip of the mask was an acoustical device for projecting the voice. On his feet he wore shoes with soles and heels half a foot high.
3.His costume was so designed that it conveyed to the audience, by convention: woman of royal birth and Oriental origin.