ELIMINATIVE STAGE-CRAFT

Hints on Writing a Scenic Drama,

Robert C. Benchley

IN view of the modern tendency toward simplicity in the drama, the elimination of detail in scenery, and the reduction of the cast to two or three characters, I have gone to great expense to produce what I feel is the dernier cri in Eliminative Stage-craft.

It is a play in one act, in which there are no characters. No words are spoken, and it has no scenery which amounts to anything. It has no name, but for those who yearn for some vestige of the old order, it may be called "Nobody Home," a vulgar phrase, to be sure, and smelling of the moment, but expressive of the spirit of this remarkable piece.

The scene may be laid in any one of a dozen or more places: in the boudoir of Mimi Michelin in her chateau just outside of Paris (just enough outside so that there can be a 10:40 train back to Paris which someone, by dint of having his things tossed into a bag by his man, can catch at the end of the second act), or it may be in the mournful sitting-room of a middle-class working-man's cottage in the gloom of London. Indeed it really makes no difference where the scene is laid as the play has no plot, a circumstance which gives the playwright a good deal of latitude.

Well, wherever it is, as the curtain goes up a door-bell is ringing viciously somewhere off-stage. It continues to ring, just as viciously, for some time and then stops and isn't heard again during the whole play. But as it was a very raucous bell, you don't mind. However, it has fulfilled its part. It has signified that someone is trying to get into the house and that either (1) there is nobody at home, or (2) if there is, he (or she) is wilfully keeping away from the door. Either explanation is entirely plausible.

However that may be, no sooner has the bell stopped ringing than a sound is heard outside. It is the noise of a self-starter refusing to start, and the steady "click-click" of a taxi-meter, so that even the most retarded intelligence in the audience can perceive that the caller who was ringing the door-bell has become thoroughly discouraged and gone away in some sort of a motor conveyance.

Then follows a long silence, broken only by the glare of the footlights and the lapping of the waves against the sides of the boat. During the silence a sunbeam darts in at the half-opened window, plays about on the carpet, snatches a fig from off a plate on the table and is off again, through the bulkhead at 1. c. The whole incident tends to heighten the impression that the man who was ringing the door-bell was right in his conclusion that there was nobody at home.

SUDDENLY the telephone rings furiously. First it rings Gramercy 1676-W, then Gramercy 1767-N, then, with a cunning twist, it shifts to Gramercy 1677-M. But there is no response. That's the trouble with having a play in which there are no characters, there is no one to answer the telephone, and, to me, a telephone-bell that is constantly ringing with no one to answer it is excessively annoying. When I got to this point in my play I was tempted to break my resolution and introduce just one character, ever so small a one, simply to say "He's out, who will I say called?" and then exit, r, and not appear again. But then I thought to myself: "What, after all, is it to me how long the bell rings?" So I just let the old thing ring until it became exhausted, and, after a frightful paroxysm of coughing, lay panting but otherwise quite still.

Then follows what is practically a repetition of the first long silence, except that the lights are considerably lower, for it is nearly fourthirty now and people all over town are beginning to say, "How early it gets late now nights."

There is a pause ... a knocking is heard on the bulkhead . . . but by this time every one in the audience is so convinced that there is nobody at home and that consequently nothing much more can happen, that they arc beginning to slip on their pumps and look to see what is the next train after the 9:15, and by the time the knocking has stopped the only person left in the house is a blond usher who is reading "What the Man will wear" column in the theatre program.

Soon the sun sets and night comes on. A chill wind springs up outside at r. c. A few flakes of snow fall half-way down and then become discouraged and go back up again. The cry of a mating meadow-lark is heard somewhere off stage and the curtain falls slowly.

THIS play has, I think, a big message. It sends you home thinking. It is a drama to which you might well take your sister or your sweetheart, for, behind all of its shocks and thrills there is this wonderful and vital Lesson, or Idea—A Man's Love for a Woman can not be bound by Convention or Society or Law, but a Woman's Place is in the Home.