2.2 Exposition
Each form has particular advantages. A retrospective play like “Rosmersholm” flows steady and full like a winding river. For light comedy and for romantic plays without in depth character-studies, it is undeniably attractive to have one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended before our eyes.
It’s difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards the end is really a device for the relaxing, to some extent, the narrow bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal with a larger segment of human experience. Shakespeare had really far more elbow room than the playwright of today with respect to the length of the play, but plays like Othello and King Lear are not very complex character studies, although projected with huge energy. Shakespeare had room as was allowed by the copious expression permitted by the rhetorical Elizabethian form. Today’s playwright is hampered by often having to work in indirect suggestion than in direct expression.
One of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquility, wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then watching the storm gather on the horizon, as in “An enemy of the people”. Sometimes the atmosphere is already charged with electricity when the play opens, like in “The Case of Rebellious Susan” by Henry Arthur Jones.
When an exposition can’t be dramatized enough through the action from the characters primarily concerned, it is better to dismiss it in any natural and probable way. If all of a given subject cannot be covered within the limits of presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left for retrospect? The curtain should be raised at the point where the crisis begins to move towards its solution, more or less rapidly and continually. Interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not be fragmented away on subsidiary or preliminary personages.
When the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them. It essential that the audience should know clearly who are the subjects of the discussion or narrative - that they should not be mere names to them. Keen expectancy is the most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long as the expectancy does not ultimately disappoint.
Where it is desired to give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it should be the first figure on which the eye of the audience falls. Let the first ten minutes be crisp, arresting, stimulating, but don’t cover any absolutely vital matter, which would leave the spectator in the dark as to the general design and purpose of the play.