The Stage. The second determining factor is the stage. What is its size? What is its equipment? Some plays require large stages; others fit smaller ones better. A large stage may be made small, but it is impossible to stretch a small one.

Equipment for a school stage need not be elaborate. Artistic ingenuity will do more than reckless expenditure. The simplest devices can be made to produce the best effects. The lighting system should admit of easy modification. For example, it should be possible to place lights in various positions for different effects. It should be possible to get much illumination or little.

Scenery. No scenery should be built when the stage is first erected.

If a regular scene painter furnishes the conventional exterior, interior, and woodland scenery, the stage equipment is almost ruined for all time. It is ridiculous that a lecturer, a musician, a school princ.i.p.al, and a student speaker, should appear before audiences in the same scenery representing a park or an elaborate drawing-room. The first furnishings for a stage should be a set of beautiful draped curtains. These can be used, not only for such undramatic purposes as those just listed, but for a great many plays as well.

No scenery should be provided until the first play is to be presented.

Certain plays can be adequately acted before screens arranged differently and colored differently for changes. When scenery must be built it should be strongly built as professional scenery is. It should also be planned for future possible manipulation. Every director of school dramatics knows the delight of utilizing the same material over and over again. Here is one instance. An interior set, neutral in tones and with no marked characteristics of style and period, was built to serve in Acts I and V of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. Hangings, furniture, costumes gave it the proper appearance.

Later it was used in _Ulysses_. It has also housed Moliere's _Doctor in Spite of Himself_ (_Le Medecin Malgre Lui_) and _The Wealthy Upstart_ (_Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_), Carrion and Aza's _Zaragueta_, Sudermann's _The Far-Away Princess_, Houghton's _The Dear Departed_.

The wooden frames on the rear side were painted black, the canvas panels tan, to serve in _Twelfth Night_ for the drinking scene, Act II, scene 3. With Greek shields upon the walls it later pictured the first scene of _The Comedy of Errors_. With colorful border designs attached and oriental furniture it set a Chinese play.

A definite series of dimensions should be decided upon, and all scenery should be built in relation to units of these sizes. As a result of this, combinations otherwise impossible can be made.

Beginners should avoid putting anything permanent upon a stage. The best stage is merely s.p.a.ce upon which beautiful pictures may be produced. Beware of adopting much lauded "new features" such as cycloramas, horizonts, until you are a.s.sured you need them and can actually use them. In most cases it is wise to consult some one with experience.

In considering plays for presentation you will have to think of whether your performers and your stage will permit of convincing production. Remembering that suggestion is often better than realism, and knowing that beautiful curtains and colored screens are more delightful to gaze upon than cheap-looking canvas and paint, and knowing that action and costume produce telling effects, decide what the stage would have to do for the following scenes.

EXERCISES

1. Read scene 2 of _Comus_ by Milton. Should the entire masque be acted out-of-doors? If presented on an indoors stage what should the setting be? Inside the palace of Comus? How then do the Brothers get in? How do Sabrina and her Nymphs arise? From a pool, a fountain?

Might the stage show an exterior? Would the palace be on one side? The edge of the woods on the other? Would the banks of the river be at the rear? Would such an arrangement make entrances, exits, acting, effective? Explain all your opinions.

Read one of the following. Devise a stage setting for it. Describe it fully. If you can, make a sketch in black and white or in color, showing it as it would appear to the audience. Or make a working plan, showing every detail. Or construct a small model of the set, making the parts so that they will stand. Or place them in a box to reproduce the stage. Use one-half inch to the foot.

2. _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, scene 1. Interior? Exterior? Color?

Lighting?

3. _Hamlet_, Act I, scene 5. Castle battlements? A graveyard? Open s.p.a.ce in country some distance from castle?

4. _Comus_, scene 3.

5. _The Tempest_, Act I, scene 1.

6. _Twelfth Night_, Act II, scene 3.

7. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act I, scene I.

8. _Julius Caesar_, Act III, scene 2.

9. In a long, high-vaulted room, looking out upon a Roman garden where the cypresses rise in narrowing shafts from thickets of oleander and myrtle, is seated a company of men and women, feasting.

WILLIAM SHARP: _The Lute-Player_

10. A room, half drawing-room, half study, in Lewis Davenant's house in Rockminister. Furniture eighteenth century, pictures, china in gla.s.s cases. An April afternoon in 1860.

GEORGE MOORE: _Elizabeth Cooper_

11. An Island off the West of Ireland. Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-skins, spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc.

J.M. SYNGE: _Riders to the Sea_

12. Loud music. After which the Scene is discovered, being a Laboratory or Alchemist's work-house. Vulcan looking at the registers, while a Cyclope, tending the fire, to the cornets began to sing.

BEN JONSON: _Mercury Vindicated_

13. Rather an awesome picture it is with the cold blue river and the great black cliffs and the blacker cypresses that grow along its banks. There are signs of a trodden slope and a ferry, and there's a rough old wooden shelter where pa.s.sengers can wait; a bell hung on the top with which they call the ferryman.

CALTHROP AND BARKER: _The Harlequinade_

Long before any play is produced there should be made a sketch or plan showing the stage settings. If it is in color it will suggest the appearance of the actual stage. One important point is to be noted.

Your sketch or model is merely a miniature of the real thing. If you have a splotch of glaring color only an inch long it will appear in the full-size setting about two feet long. A seemingly flat surface three by five inches in the design will come out six by ten feet behind the footlights.

Casting the Play. When the play is selected, the roles must be cast.

To select the performers, one of many different methods may be followed. The instructor of the cla.s.s or the director of the production may a.s.sign parts to individuals. When this person knows the requirements of the roles and the abilities of the members, this method always saves time and effort. By placing all the responsibility upon one person it emphasizes care in choosing to secure best results.

At times a committee may do the casting. Such a method prevents personal prejudice and immature judgments from operating. It splits responsibility and requires more time than the first method. It is an excellent method for seconding the opinions of a director who does not know very well the applicants for parts. The third method is by "try-outs." In this the applicants show their ability. This may be done by speaking or reciting before an audience, a committee, or the director. It may consist of acting some role. It may be the delivery of lines from the play to be acted. It may be in a "cast reading" in which persons stand about the stage or room and read the lines of characters in the play. If there are three or four applicants for one part, each is given a chance to act some scene. In this manner all the roles are filled.

There are two drawbacks to this scheme which is the fairest which can be devised. It consumes a great deal of time. Some member of the cla.s.s or organization best fitted to play a role may not feel disposed to try for it. Manifestly he should be the one selected. But it appears unfair to disregard the three boys who have made the effort while he has done nothing. Yet every role should be acted in the very best manner. For the play's sake, the best actor should be a.s.signed the part. A pupil may try for a part for which he is not at all suited, while he could fill another role better than any one who strives to get it.

In a cla.s.s which has been trained in public speaking or dramatics as this book suggests, it should be no difficult task to cast any play, whether full-length or one act. Performers must always be chosen because of the possible development of their latent abilities rather than for a.s.sured attainments.

These qualities must be sought for in performers of roles--obedience, dependableness, mobility, patience, endurance.

Rehearsing. A worthy play which is well cast is an a.s.sured success before its first rehearsal.

The entire group should first study the whole play under the director's comment. It is best to have each actor read his own part.

The behavior of a minor character in the second act may depend upon a speech in the first. The person playing that role must seize upon that hint for his own interpretation.

It might be a good thing to have every person "letter perfect," that is, know all his speeches, at the first rehearsal. Practically, this never occurs. Reading from the book or the ma.n.u.script, a performer "walks through" his part, getting at the same time an idea of where he is to stand, how to move, how to speak, what to do, where to enter, when to cross the stage. All such directions he should jot down upon his part. Then memorizing the lines will fix these stage directions in his mind. He will be a.s.similating at the same time lines and "business." "Business" on the stage is everything done by a character except speaking lines.

At all rehearsals the director is in absolute charge. His word is final law. This does not mean that members of the cast may not discuss things with him, and suggest details and additions. They must be careful to choose a proper time to do such things. They should never argue, but follow directions. Time outside rehearsals may be devoted to clearing up points. Of course an actor should never lose his temper. Neither should the director. Both of these bits of advice are frequently almost beyond observation of living human beings. Yet they are the rules.

Rehearsals should be frequent rather than long. Acts should be rehea.r.s.ed separately. Frequently only separate portions should be repeated. Combinations should be made so as not to keep during long waits characters with only a few words. Early portions will have to be repeated more frequently than later ones to allow the actors to get into their characterizations. Tense, romantic, sentimental, comic scenes may have to be rehea.r.s.ed privately until they are quite good enough to interest other members of the cast.

The time for preparation will depend upon general ability of the cast, previous training, the kind of play, the amount of leisure for study and rehearsing. In most schools a full-length play may be crowded into four weeks. Six or seven weeks are a better allowance.

During first rehearsals changes and corrections should be made when needed. Interruptions should be frequent. Later there should be no interruptions. Comments should be made at the end of a scene and embodied in an immediate repet.i.tion to fix the change in the actors'

minds. Other modifications should be announced before rehearsal, and embodied in the acting that day.

The acting should be ready for an audience a week before the date set for the performance. During the last rehearsals, early acts should be recalled and repeated in connection with later ones, so that time and endurance may be counted and estimated. During these days rehearsals must go forward without any attention from the director. He must be giving all his attention to setting, lighting, costumes, properties, furniture, and the thousand and one other details which make play producing the discouraging yet fascinating occupation it is. Such repet.i.tion without constant direction will develop a sense of independence and cooperation in the actors and a.s.sistants which will show in the enthusiasm and ease of the performance. Stage hands and all other a.s.sistants must be trained to the same degree of reliability as the hero and heroine. Nothing can be left to chance. Nothing can be unprovided until the last minute. The dress rehearsal must be exactly like a performance, except that the audience is not present, or if present, is a different one. In schools, an audience at the dress rehearsal is usually a help to the amateur performers.

Results. A performance based on such principles and training as here suggested should be successful from every point of view.

The benefits to the partic.i.p.ants are many. They include strengthening of the power to memorize, widening of the imagination through interpretation of character, familiarity with a work of art, training in poise, utilization of speaking ability, awakening of self-confidence, and partic.i.p.ation in a worthy cooperative effort.

In a broader sense such interest in good, acted plays is an intellectual stimulus. As better plays are more and more effectively presented the quality of play production in schools will be improved, and both pupils and communities will know more and more of the world's great dramatic literature.