AN OPEN LETTER
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
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