Dialogues. As it is easier to get two people to speak naturally than where more are involved we shall begin conversation with dialogues.

Each character will find the lines springing spontaneously from the situation. In dramatic composition any speech delivered by a character is called a line, no matter how short or long it is.

As you deliver the dialogues suggested by the exercises try to make your speeches sound natural. Talk as real people talk. Make the remarks conversational, or colloquial, as this style is also termed.

What things will make conversation realistic? In actual talk, people antic.i.p.ate. Speakers do not wait for others to finish. They interrupt.

They indicate opinions and impressions by facial expression and slight bodily movements. Tone changes as feelings change.

Try to make your remarks convey to the audience the circ.u.mstances surrounding the dialogue. Let the conversation make some point clear.

Before you begin, determine in your own mind the characterization you intend to present.

Situation. A girl buys some fruit from the keeper of a stand at a street corner.

What kind of girl? Age? Manner of speaking? Courteous? Flippant?

Well-bred? Slangy? Working girl? Visitor to town?

What kind of man? Age? American? Foreigner? From what country?

Dialect? Disposition? Suspicious? Sympathetic?

Weather? Season of year? Do they talk about that? About themselves?

Does the heat make her long for her home in the country? Does the cold make him think of his native Italy or Greece? Will her remarks change his short, gruff answers to interested questions about her home? Will his enthusiasm for his native land change her flippancy to interest in far-off romantic countries? How would the last detail impress the change, if you decide to have one? Might he call her back and force her to take a gift? Might she deliver an impressive phrase, then dash away as though startled by her exhibition of sympathetic feeling?

These are mere suggestions. Two pupils might present the scene as indicated by these questions. Two others might show it as broadly comic, and end by having the girl--at a safe distance--triumphantly show that she had stolen a second fruit. That might give him the cue to end in a tirade of almost inarticulate abuse, or he might stand in silence, expressing by his face the emotions surging over him. And his feeling need not be entirely anger, either. It might border on admiration for her amazing audacity, or pathetic helplessness, or comic despair, or determination to "get even" next time.

Before you attempt to present any of the following suggestive exercises you should consider every possibility carefully and decide definitely and consistently all the questions that may arise concerning every detail.

EXERCISES

1. Let a boy come into the room and try to induce a girl (the mistress of a house) to have a telephone installed. Make the dialogue realistic and interesting.

2. Let a girl demonstrate a vacuum cleaner (or some other appliance) to another girl (mistress of a house).

3. Let a boy apply for a position to a man in an office.

4. Let a boy dictate a letter to a gum-chewing, fidgety, harum-scarum stenographer.

5. Let this stenographer tell the telephone girl about this.

6. Show how a younger sister might talk at a baseball or football game to her slightly older brother who was coerced into bringing her with him.

7. Show a fastidious woman at a dress goods counter, and the tired, but courteous clerk. Do not caricature, but try to give an air of reality to this.

8. Show how two young friends who have not seen each other for weeks might talk when they meet again.

9. Deliver the thoughts of a pupil at eleven o'clock at night trying to choose the topic for an English composition due the next morning.

Have him talk to his mother, or father, or older brother, or sister.

10. A foreign woman speaking and understanding little English, with a ticket to Springfield, has by mistake boarded a through train which does not stop there. The conductor, a man, and woman try to explain to her what she must do.

11. Let three different pairs of pupils represent the girl and the fruit seller cited in the paragraphs preceding these exercises.

12. A young man takes a girl riding in a new automobile. Reproduce parts of the ride.

13. Two graduates of your school meet after many years in a distant place. Reproduce their reminiscenses.

14. A woman in a car or coach has lost or misplaced her transfer or ticket. Give the conversation between her and the conductor.

15. Let various pairs of pupils reproduce the conversations of patrons of moving pictures.

16. Suggest other characters in appropriate situations. Present them before the cla.s.s.

Characters Conceived by Others. In all the preceding exercises you have been quite unrestricted in your interpretation. You have been able to make up entirely the character you presented. Except for a few stated details of s.e.x, age, occupation, nature, no suggestions were given of the person indicated. Delineation is fairly easy to construct when you are given such a free choice of all possibilities.

The next kind of exercise will involve a restriction to make the acting a little more like the acting of a role in a regular play. Even here, however, a great deal is left to the pupil's thought and decision.

How much chance there may be for such individual thought and decision in a finished play written by a careful dramatist may be ill.u.s.trated by _Fame and the Poet_ by Lord Dunsany. One of the characters is a Lieutenant-Major who calls upon a poet in London. Nothing is said about his costume. In one city an actor asked the British consul. He said officers of the army do not wear their uniforms except when in active service, but on the British stage one great actor had by his example created the convention of wearing the uniform. In another city at exactly the same time the author himself was asked the same question. He said that by no means should the actor wear a uniform.

In the next exercises you are to represent characters with whom you have become acquainted in books. You will therefore know something about their dispositions, their appearance, and their actions. Your task will be to give life-like portraits which others will recognize as true to their opinions of these same people. For all who have read the books the general outlines will be identical. The added details must not contradict any of the traits depicted by the authors.

Otherwise they may be as original as you can imagine.

In the _Odyssey_, the great old Greek poem by Homer, the wandering hero, Odysseus (also called Ulysses), is cast up by the sea upon a strange sh.o.r.e. Here he meets Nausicaa (p.r.o.nounced Nau-si'-ca-a) who offers to show him the way to the palace of her father, the Bang. But as she is betrothed she fears that if she is seen in the company of an unknown man some scandalous gossip may be carried to her sweetheart.

So she directs that when they near the town Odysseus shall tarry behind, allowing her to enter alone. In this naive incident this much is told in detail by the poet. We are not told whether any gossip does reach the lover's ears. He does not appear in the story. We are not told even his name. Nor are we told how either she or he behaved when they first met, after she had conducted the stranger to the palace.

If you enact this scene of their meeting you will first have to find a name for him. You are free to create all the details of their behavior and conversation. Was he angry? Was he cool towards her? Had he heard a false account?

Before attempting any of the following exercises decide all the matters of interpretation as already indicated in this chapter.

EXERCISES

1. Molly Farren tries to get news of G.o.dfrey Ca.s.s from a Stable-boy.

_Silas Marner_.

2. The two Miss Gunns talk about Priscilla Lammeter. _Silas Marner_.

3. The Wedding Guest meets one of his companions. _The Ancient Mariner_.

4. Nausicaa tells her betrothed about Odysseus. _Odyssey_.

5. Reynaldo in Paris tries to get information about Laertes.

_Hamlet_.

6. Fred tells his wife about Scrooge and Crachit. _A Christmas Carol_.

7. Jupiter tells a friend of the finding of the treasure. _The Gold Bug_.

8. Two women who know David Copperfield talk about his second marriage. _David Copperfield_.

Memorized Conversations. You can approach still more closely to the material of a play if you offer in speech before your cla.s.s certain suitable portions from books you are reading or have read. These selections may be made from the regular cla.s.s texts or from supplementary reading a.s.signments. In studying these pa.s.sages with the intention of offering them before the cla.s.s you will have to think about two things. First of all, the author has in all probability, somewhere in the book, given a fairly detailed, exact description of the looks and actions of these characters. If such a description does not occur in an extended pa.s.sage, there is likely to be a series of statements scattered about, from which a reader builds up an idea of what the character is like. The pupil who intends to represent a person from a book or poem must study the author's picture to be able to reproduce a convincing portrait.

The audience will pa.s.s over mere physical differences. A young girl described in a story as having blue eyes may be acted by a girl with brown, and be accepted. But if the author states that under every kind remark she made there lurked a slight hint of envy, that difficult suggestion to put into a tone must be striven for, or the audience will not receive an adequate impression of the girl's disposition.