XIII

THEMES IN THE THEATRE

As the final curtain falls upon the majority of the plays that somehow get themselves presented in the theatres of New York, the critical observer feels tempted to ask the playwright that simple question of young Peterkin in Robert Southey’s ballad, After Blenheim,—­“Now tell us what ’t was all about”; and he suffers an uncomfortable feeling that the playwright will be obliged to answer in the words of old Kaspar, “Why, that I cannot tell.”  The critic has viewed a semblance of a dramatic struggle between puppets on the stage; but what they fought each other for he cannot well make out.  And it is evident, in the majority of cases, that the playwright could not tell him if he would, for the reason that the playwright does not know.  Not even the author can know what a play is all about when the play isn’t about anything.  And this, it must be admitted, is precisely what is wrong with the majority of the plays that are shown in our theatres, especially with plays written by American authors.  They are not about anything; or, to say the matter more technically, they haven’t any theme.

By a theme is meant some eternal principle, or truth, of human life—­such a truth as might be stated by a man of philosophic mind in an abstract and general proposition—­which the dramatist contrives to convey to his auditors concretely by embodying it in the particular details of his play.  These details must be so selected as to represent at every point some phase of the central and informing truth, and no incidents or characters must be shown which are not directly or indirectly representative of the one thing which, in that particular piece, the author has to say.  The great plays of the world have all grown endogenously from a single, central idea; or, to vary the figure, they have been spun like spider-webs, filament after filament, out of a central living source.  But most of our native playwrights seem seldom to experience this necessary process of the imagination which creates.  Instead of working from the inside out, they work from the outside in.  They gather up a haphazard handful of theatric situations and try to string them together into a story; they congregate an ill-assorted company of characters and try to achieve a play by letting them talk to each other.  Many of our playwrights are endowed with a sense of situation; several of them have a gift for characterisation, or at least for caricature; and most of them can write easy and natural dialogue, especially in slang.  But very few of them start out with something to say, as Mr. Moody started out in The Great Divide and Mr. Thomas in The Witching Hour.