A good way to obviate disparaging comparison is to avoid reference to time—­either in the dialogue or by the movements of events.

To sum up the whole matter, a vaudeville playlet may be considered as preserving unity of time when its action occurs in continuous minutes of about the length the episode would take to occur in real life.

3.  Unity of Place

The commercial element of vaudeville often makes it inadvisable for a playlet to show more than one scene—­very often an otherwise acceptable playlet is refused production because the cost of supplying special scenes makes it a bad business venture. [1]

[1] See Chapter III.

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.

[2] See Chapter I.

This third and last unity of the playlet may, however, for all save the master-craftsman, be safely stated as follows: 

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.

We may now condense the three dramatic unities into a statement peculiarly applicable to the playlet—­which would seem as though specially designed to fulfill them all: 

  A playlet preserves the dramatic unities when it shows one action
  in one time and in one place.

And now it may be worth while once more to sum up what I have said about the elements of plot—­of which the skeleton of every playlet must be made up: 

A mere sequence of events is not a plot; to become a plot there must develop a crisis or entanglement due to a conflict of the characters’ wills; the entanglement must be of such importance that when it is untangled the characters will be in a different relation to each other—­changed in themselves by the crisis.  A plot is divided into three parts:  a Beginning, a Middle and an Ending.  The Beginning must state the premises of the playlet’s problem clearly and simply; the Middle must develop the problem logically and solve the entanglement in a “big” scene, and the Ending must round out the whole satisfyingly—­with a surprise, if fitting.  A plot, furthermore, must be so constructed that the removal of anyone of its component parts will be detrimental to the whole.  It is told best when its action occurs in continuous time of about the length the episode would take to occur in real life and does not require the changing of scenery.  Thus will a playlet be made to give the singleness of effect that is the height of playlet art.