A wide range of themes is shown in even these few playlets, isn’t there?  Yet the actual range of themes from which playlet problems may be chosen is not even suggested.  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.  Whatever causes you to stop and think, to laugh or cry, is a playlet problem.  “Art is life seen through a personality,” is as true of the playlet as of any other art form.

Because some certain subject or theme has never been treated in a playlet, does not mean that it cannot be.  It simply means that that particular subject has never yet appealed to a man able to present it successfully.  Vaudeville is hungering for writers able to make gripping playlets out of themes that never have been treated well.  To such it offers its largest rewards.  What do you know better than anyone else—­what do you feel keener than anyone else does—­what can you present better than anyone else?  That is the subject you should choose for your playlet problem.

And so you see that a playlet problem is not merely just “an idea”; it is a subject that appeals to a writer as offering itself with peculiar credentials—­as the theme that he should select.  It is anything at all—­anything that you can make your own by your mastery of its every angle.

1.  What Themes to Avoid

(a) Unfamiliar Themes.  If a subject of which you have not a familiar knowledge presents itself to you, reject it.  Imagine how a producer, the actors and an audience—­if they let the thing go that far—­would laugh at a playlet whose premises were false and whose incidents were silly, because untrue.  Never give anyone an opportunity to look up from a manuscript of yours and grin, as he says:  “This person’s a fool; he doesn’t know what he’s writing about.”

(b) "Cause” Themes.  Although more powerful than the “stump” or the pulpit today, and but little less forceful than the newspaper as a means of exposing intolerable conditions and ushering in new and better knowledge, the stage is not the place for propaganda.  The public goes to the theatre to be entertained, not instructed—­particularly is this true of vaudeville—­and the writer daring enough to attempt to administer even homeopathic doses of instruction, must be a master-hand to win.  Once in a generation a Shaw may rise, who, by a twist of his pen, can make the public think, while he wears a guileful smile as he propounds philosophy from under a jester’s cap; but even then his plays must be edited—­as some of Shaw’s are—­of all but the most dramatic of his belligerently impudent notions.