T

HERE is an art about which no book has ever been written; about which the card catalogues of the vastest public libraries are silent; about which no brochure is passed from hand to hand. And yet it is a craft that is sedulously practiced not only in Europe but in America. It thrives in playhouses and classrooms, in colleges, in Little Theatres, and in teachers' training schools. Great playwrights as well as the veriest beginners have experimented with it. It is the art of the children's play.

What is its fascination for the playwright or the tyro? Only in a very few instances is it a thing of great money making power. The poet and the children's playwright are alike in knowing that their reward, as Robert Louis Stevenson has said, must be in the work itself.

There have been a few instances where children's plays have brought fame and fortune to their authors: "Peter Pan," by Barrie; "Editha's Burglar" and "Little Lord Fauntleroy," by Frances Hodgson Burnett; "The Blue Bird," by Maeterlinck (which with the exception of a few scenes is really a children's play), and perhaps a little less successful from the monetary point of view, but every whit as delightful, "Treasure Island," by Jules Eckert Goodman, "Snow White," by Jessie Graham White, and, for children who are a little older, "Prince and Pauper," "The Piper," "Little Women," "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," and "Mother Carey's Chickens."

Since this range covers twenty years, it is evident that no great financial reward can be looked for. No, it is the lure of the work itself the touch of fantasy that delights the experienced playwright, the deliberate stepping back into romance, history, or faerie, the Never Never Land of childhood. And for

the inexperienced playwright it offers a wonderful field for the testing, strengthening, and developing of his powers. Nor are the financial rewards of the average successful children's play which is given in Little Theatres, colleges, and schools a sneezing matter.

Percival Wilde (himself the author of several charming children's plays, including "Reverie" and "The Toy Shop"), has recently intimated that such a children's play taken over a certain number of years, will, if it proves popular, bring its author a sum in at least four figures. To gain this figure or perhaps to have his rewards run into five figures the playwright takes into account magazine rights, book rights, second serial rights, production rights, and (but this is very rare) movie rights, though it is hoped that with the new movement for movies there will actually be children's movies and then these rights will yield more revenue.

Children's plays read over the radio bring money to the reader; but not to the author of the plays. Perhaps, this, too, will change.

American managers nowadays will not consider children's plays, so it is of no use for the tyro to waste time on that field. But in a practical notebook should be kept a list of Children's Theatres and Little Theatres to which his play may be sent when it is completed. An even wiser method is to try out the play under an assumed name and a temporary title in the locality in which the author lives, testing the response of the child audience, watching to see where the play needs cutting, or strengthening, or crystallizing. Playwriting is rewriting. But, as has already been suggested, it is the joy of the work itself which has led such well-known dramatists as Lady Gregory, Walter de la Mare, and Milne to dip their experienced pens into the rainbow fluid of fantasy.

The initial idea! Aye, there's the rub. Where is that to come from? If the dramatist evolves an idea from his own consciousness, that is one thing; but suppose, instead, he dramatizes some existing story? In the latter case, if the story is copyrighted, he must obtain the consent of author and publisher, and share a portion of his royalties.

In case he evolves his own idea there is the duplication pitfall to look out for. The idea may seem new to its happy author, yet suppose it is not? How is he to know?

The best thing to do in this case is to take a fountain pen and a notebook and delve in the children's shelves of the nearest public library, going over children's plays, making a check list of what has been done, and seeing the exact mode in which successful writers of children's plays have gone about their work.

There are, too, in public libraries, available lists of children's plays which give the plots of each. These can be rapidly gone over. If the would-be dramatist finds his plot is a new one, or if, after copious reading of the best and latest stories for children, he finds a theme, and gets permission to dramatize it, he is then ready to get to work.

He first makes a scenario or complete outline of the play. This outline will either grow or diminish as he works on it, and by the time he gets it done he will know whether he has the material for a one-act, two-act, or three-act play. Just here is where many beginning dramatists make a great mistake. With only material enough for a one-act play they try to evolve three acts.

Suppose it is a one-act play about the dream-children of Charles Lamb in which he is the sole adult figure and the rest wee players. What do you know of Charles Lamb? How does he express himself in his essays? In his letters? How shall a wistful dreamlike quality be given to the play? Will it not be a one-act play of twilight-colored mood? Or is it a two-act play about Kate Greenaway? What were her pictures? What was her life? Will it not be a play of delicate pas

tel shades suggesting hawthorne and English hedgerows?

Playwriting for children is governed by the same rules as playwriting for adults. There must be a beginning, a middle, and an end. There must be what the Greeks declared was the essence of drama-struggle. The younger son sets out to reach a goal. Three times he is frustrated, but in the end he succeeds. His frustrations and final success may be given in one act or in three acts. But each scene, each bit of dialogue, must speed him on his way, must be built toward a climax.

Yet there is one rule wherein children's playwriting differs from adult playwriting; and that is, its theme must be one which children will appreciate, its dialogue must be within their comprehension. That is, the play must be written for the child mind. It must contain the essence of the things which children think about when they are by themselves, and the children's playwright can best capture this feeling by looking back to his or her own childhood, and writing from that standpoint. This does not mean that the plays should be namby-pamby. Far from it. Although he never wrote plays for children, Edmond Rostand had this sense of the small intimate fairy world of very little children. as shown by his making a morning-glory into a telephone: his raindrops that are "sweet sky-born water caught in cups of stone."

In writing a children's play cut the lines to a minimum. Adults can be interested in dialogue, but a child audience is interested in what is done. The tyro can watch this truth in action by closely observing the next children's play he sees.

The manner in which children's plays are written counts for much, whether poetic, or romantic, or symbolic, or fairy-like, or quaintly homespun. They should never be clapped together with the thought: "Oh, well, they are only children! This is good enough for them." Strangely enough, no one is more swift to sense this kind of play-writing than children themselves.

Any sound work done in the writing of children's plays has one great compensation other than that of money-the compensation of longevity. Fashions in adult plays come and go; what is new today is old tomorrow; but children's plays are written outside of time. They belong to an imaginative world that continues to exist for succeeding generations.

It need scarcely be added that the beginning playwright should see all the productions of children's plays in whatever theatre they are available, or, failing that, in the school.

Study the child audience. Talk with teachers, directors, librarians. Watch the points made so quietly, yet, oh, so surely, by the children's story teller! Above all, keep a notebook of this quest. It may prove invaluable later on for consultation, for teaching, for producing, or for articles.

For the completed manuscript, neatly typed and bound, the would-be playwright keeps a list of possible Little Theatres, Children's Theatres, and special Christmas Matinee groups where plays can be sent; also a list of places where prizes are offered for play competitions. As the MS. travels from place to place its author will keep in mind Disraeli's heartening dictum: "Victory is the power to wait."

For a sum the value of which will be worth five times as much to him later the tyro can secure the opinion of an expert literary agent on his play, with a detailed criticism. And, of

course, playwriting courses in colleges and dramatic institutes are also available.

Often, in order to get the right type of tryout, the young dramatist will have to undertake the production of his own play. This is often more exacting than it sounds. Whether the players are young adults or children, there will be an immense amount of detail connected with it. Even though a producing committee is thoroughly organized, unless it is one that is used to workshop methods, there must still be one dominating director who will correlate all the business and see to all the loose ends. Sometimes no such experienced committee can be found, and then it falls to the lot of the young directordramatist to see to the auditorium, the lights, the properties, the costumes, and the incidental music, if there is any, as well as conducting the rehearsals, and counseling on all such matters as the layout of programs, printing, tickets, sale of seats, advertising, presswork, photographs for papers, and posters for

stores.

By the time the first performance is over, the producer-dramatist of the children's play will have gained not only a profound knowledge of child psychology, but at least a craftsman's actual knowledge of the difficulties and subtleties of playwriting and producing and a rudimentary knowledge of costume, painting, lighting, and the business side of the theatre. He will, perhaps, have become what Gordon Craig has termed "a theatre worker."

THIS

HIS being the age of confessions, it was not so startling as it was dispiriting to read in a magazine for writers the cheerful admission that advertisers and advertising agencies are the power behind many of the editorial chairs.

"Decry as young authors will," says the magazine, "the preference of many national magazines for 'big names,' it should not be difficult to see the point of view of an editor confronted by this situation: In many cases, it is pointed out, the advertisers and advertising agencies, instead of merely looking at the circulation figures of the magazines with which they contemplate placing their contributions are wont to demand: 'Who will write for your magazine next year?'"

I am not one of those who decry the preference for big names - provided that the big names are backed by big stories - but it seems to me that this acknowledgment of coercion by advertisers and submission by editors is the ultimate insult not only to the writing craft but to the reading public as well.

Granted that the chief source of revenue derived from magazine publishing comes from advertisements, is there not a possibility of killing the goose that lays the golden egg? In other words, may not readers become exasperated to the point where they will decline to buy the magazines that seem to be primarily house-organs for commercial products, with a sprinkling of fiction and miscellany for bait?

In one of the best so-called woman's magazines, there are one hundred and three full pages devoted to advertising in comparison with fifty-one pages of the stuff that magazines should be made of. And when it comes to that diabolical device of breaking stories and articles into innumerable pieces and scattering them at random through advertising matter, you will find the proportion about

evenly balanced. The result is a magazine so heavy and clumsy that it is impossible to read it with any comfort.

Some of these magazines have greatly reduced their price, due, no doubt, to the profits from the gluttony of advertisers. Personally, I prefer to pay a fair price for a magazine that I can read without irritation detracting attention from the printed page. Acting upon this preference, I have discontinued buying the cumbersome magazines and turn the pennies thus released into the coffers of a few of the higher quality magazines that keep advertisements where they belong; in a section by themselves.

Just how originated the idiosyncrasy that an advertisement gained prestige by intruding upon stories and articles always has been a mystery to me. Certainly no discriminating reader is going to pause midway in a story by Galsworthy, Conrad, Willa Cather, or any other artist, to read an advertisement for tooth paste or pancake flour. If he is interested enough in advertisements to read them at all he will be interested enough to seek them out in their proper place at the proper time. Those flamboyant, rhapsodic blurbs that many of the advertisements have degenerated into are becoming as tiresome and annoying to the reader as the disfiguring billboards are

to the motorist.

When I am told that advertisers have the last word as to what literature shall be offered us, and when I read some of the literature (?) for which they stand sponsors, I shudder at thought of what the mental diet of readers is destined to be. Is it in an attempt to show us Fiction as she should be fictionized that we find the advertisers stealing the thunder of the short story writer to boom on their own commercial pages? True, as yet, technique seems