1.3 Dramatic or not Continued
In a play by James Bernard Fagan, “The Prayer of the Sword”, there is
a clear example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea destined for the priesthood falls in love, and the tragedy ought to lie in the conflict between this earthly passion and his heavenly calling and election. The fact that he has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the matter. There would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had defied Heaven, and endangered his immortal soul because of his
overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation - but the author had carefully avoided it – unfortunately. From the outset it had been impressed upon the audience that he had no priestly vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty. His struggles were all with external forces and influences. Therefore the play, which a real obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental romance … and was forgotten.
If conflict is not the essence of drama, what is? What would be the
common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as specifically dramatic? Crisis. Drama may be called the art of crisis. A play is a fairly rapid developing crisis in destiny or circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, furthering the ultimate event. Drama deals with rapid and startling changes, “peripeties,” as the Greeks called them, which actually occur in very brief spaces of time. Not every crisis is that dramatic. A serious illness, a law suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage may be a crisis in a man’s life, without being necessarily suitable material for drama. How do we distinguish a dramatic from a non-dramatic crisis? By the fact that it can be made to naturally develop through a series of minor crises, involving emotional excitement, and the vivid manifestation of character. A well used example could be bankruptcy, following a course of gambling, generally in stocks. Here is evident opportunity for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace emotion.
In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme. Few American dramatists can resist the temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the “ticker” which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. Here the great crisis brings out vivid manifestations of character, not only in the bankrupt person himself, but in those around him, and naturally unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises in interesting and moving scenes. Plays like “A bankruptcy” (Bjornson) and “La Doloureuse” (Maurice Donnay) pursue this theme.
Generally speaking, the dramatic way of presenting individual incidents could be described as crisp, staccato, shocking to the nerves and dealing with curiosity and surprise. People probably enjoy emotion more than pure apprehension. The most dramatic effect will therefore be created by handling an incident such as to extract the greatest variety of poignancy of emotion from it.