Miss Lulu Bett (play)
MISS LULU BETT
ZONA GALE
MISS LULU BETT
A Play
By Zona Gale
T249
MISS LULU BETT
AN AMERICAN COMEDY
OF MANNERS
BY
ZONA GALE
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK : LONDON : MCMXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
BROCK PEMBERTON
IN DEEP APPRECIATION
OF HIS CREATIVE WORK
IN PRODUCING AND STAGING
THIS PLAY
THE AUTHOR WISHES TO
MAKE ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO
MR. LYTTON W. KERNAN
FOR ASSISTANCE TO HER
IN MATTERS OF TECHNIQUE
AN OPEN LETTER
from
THOMAS H. DICKINSON
Dear Miss Gale:
Any foreword that I can write to your play, Miss Lulu Bett, must be addressed to you, and others must read it, if at all, over your shoulder. As an artist you are, of course, not interested in definitions, being absorbed rather in always nearer and nearer approximations; but I shall not, on that account, forbear to remark how much your novel, and the play that followed it, have widened the practice of the arts that they represent.
As a matter of fact, if one would understand your novel, one must think of it in terms of dramatic art. It is a commonplace to say that this novel marks a turning point in your art. But perhaps it is not a commonplace to say that if we look back over the road you have traveled we shall find a theater at the crossroads.
Are we then to consider the play in the light of the technique of fiction? By no means! Rather one is filled with wonder that you, an artist heretofore of the more discursive type, should have out-theatred the theater when you come to practice on its narrow stage. If the theater is an art of condensation here is condensation distilled; if of form, here is form refined and simplified; if of discourse, here is discourse summarized to shorthand. We are told that a true play is like a score for an orchestra; that it is a series of expert notes directed to the conductor and his players. Of no play of recent years is this so truly the case as of Miss Lulu Bett. Not here are the spacious character analyses, the circumstantial prescriptions of movements from right to left. And yet in what recent play are characters so silhouette-clear, or are actions so genuinely of the fabric of the fable? Let him who thinks your play a “comedy of words” skip a page or even a speech and see where he finds himself.
As for your two endings,—that is for you to say. Frankly the matter doesn’t interest me greatly, for it goes back to the consideration of the drama as a social art, while I, forgetting its dependent state, would prefer to think of it as the product of the free spirit of the writer. I know that I may not so think of a play any more than that you may so write one. But I will not admit that the matter has anything to do with happy versus drab endings, or with the variations in inclination of the curve of Lulu Bett’s career. Nor has it anything to do with the relative excellence of this or that. It is concerned entirely with the fact that while as practiced to-day the art of fiction permits to the artist more or less independence in the use of his imagination, in writing a play he can rarely forget that he is working with a collaborator who at the best perplexes him and at the worst strikes terror to his heart.
Granting, as I do, that you may have two endings I see no reason why you should not have half a dozen if you wish and if circumstances require them. All I ask is that one of these be the ending of your choice. If one of these endings be the artist’s own I care not what ending he writes in collaboration. The best thing you have done in offering to the reader your two endings is to show him the documents in the case. To this extent you have taken another step toward that declaration of the independence of dramatic authorship that is sorely needed.
For the craftmanship of your play, for the combined burden and opportunity you give to your producer and to the actors (admirably carried in every respect), for the courage of its refusals, not less than of its manifest innovations, I, with thousands of others, well-wishers for the American theater, am profoundly grateful to you.
Milton, Conn.
CHARACTERS:
DWIGHT DEACON
INA DEACON
DIANA DEACON
MONONA DEACON
NINIAN DEACON
LULU BETT
MRS. BETT
BOBBY LARKIN
MR. CORNISH
Contents[edit]
Act I
Act II
Act III
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1921, before the cutoff of January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1938, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 85 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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