Chapter IX: Making a Scenario

There is frequent and decided divergence of opinion among dramatists as to the value of a scenario,--the outline of a play which the dramatist purposes to write or has already written. Some dramatists very carefully prepare a detailed outline before they settle down to writing a play. Others, equally well-known on the stage assert: "I never think of mapping out in detail what I intend to write. When I begin, I may know only my central situation or little more than my main characters in broadest outline. I simply write and rewrite until the perfected manuscript lies before me." Another declares that although he has no scenario, he does use some notes. Showing these notes,--an accumulation of ideas as they have come to him from time to time, written anywhere on a single sheet without apparent order or form,--he asks triumphantly whether this can be called a scenario. Whatever the opinion of a dramatist as to the usual value to him of a scenario, he can hardly deny that there are times when it is very convenient to have a scenario of a play not yet completed. Plays sometimes have a curious, unexpected way of forcing themselves on the attention of a writer when his mind should be engrossed with another play. Ideas wholly irrelevant to the play in question keep surging into the dramatist's mind and drawing his attention from the subject in which he wishes to be interested. Often he can relieve his mind of this Banquo-like play, not by stopping to write it out in full, but by putting a careful outline of it on paper and storing this away until such time as he has opportunity to work out the play from this scenario. Or it may be that a dramatist sees that plays he has submitted to some manager or actor are not attractive, but that some subject which as yet lies only half-formed in his mind finds, when mentioned, a ready response. Here is the best opportunity for use of a good scenario. Submit such to the actor or manager in question and even if a contract does not follow, the promise, "I will produce your play if it is as good as your scenario" is very likely to be made. Admitting then, for the moment, that some dramatists believe they can get on equally well without a scenario as a prerequisite for one of their plays, what are the main characteristics of a good scenario--this form of outline which some dramatists have found very useful in their work?

In the first place, the word "scenario" has been very carelessly used. It is often applied to as brief a set of notes as the following, intended by Ibsen merely to suggest to his correspondent in the broadest possible way the play which he thinks might be made from the poem which he has been discussing:

Have you not noticed that you have in the division of your poem
entitled, _A Norwegian Sculptor_, the subject for a five-act popular
play (Folkeskuespil)? Act 1. In the Mountains. The wood-carver. The
art-enthusiast from the capital discovers him and takes him away with
him. Act 2. In Christiania. The boy the hero of the day; great hopes;
sent to Rome. Act. 3. In Rome. Life there among the artists and the
Italian lower class. Act 4. Many years later. Return to Christiania;
forgotten; everything changed. Act 5. At home again in the mountain
parish; ruin. Write this with songs and dances and popular costumes
and irony and devilry.[1] ...

In the following from _Little Stories of New Plays_ we have a far better summary than in the instance just cited, but surely even this is an outline and not a dramatic scenario, for intentionally it does not convey to a reader just that for which he would go to the theatre, the emotional treatment of the scenes--here given only in the merest outline.

GENERAL JOHN REGAN

BY GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM

_Characters_

_Dr. Lucius O'Grady._ _Constable Moriarity, R.I.C._
_Timothy Doyle._ _Tom Kerrigan, bandmaster._
_Major Ken._ _Rev. Father McCormack._
_Thaddeus Golligher._ _Lord Alfred Blakeney._
_Horace P. Billing._ _Mrs. de Courvy._
_C. Gregg, district inspector._ _Mrs. Gregg._
_Sergeant Colgan, R.I.C._ _Mary Ellen._

_Into Ballymoy, a sleepy little town in the west of Ireland, comes
Horace P. Billing, one gentle summer day, and spins in the market
place a tale of a certain General John Regan, who, he said, these many
years agone had been born and had sailed from Ballymoy to free the
oppressed people of Bolivia, and who was the great national hero of
that Republic from that time to the present day._

_Comes there to listen to his tale one Doctor Lucius O'Grady, whose
nose can no more keep out of other people's business than can his busy
brain refrain from all manner of schemings or his tongue from uttering
the grandest, gloriousest, whooping lies that the mouth of man e'er
uttered._

_To the American tourist he unreels anecdote and episode dealing with
the romantic life of the great General while he had been yet a boy in
Ballymoy. He sends Golligher, the editor of the Connaught Eagle, to
show the American gentleman the birthplace of the General, a broken
down cow-shed, in a nearby field._

_The American leaves Ballymoy wildly excited and fermenting under the
constant nagging of the doctor's busy self and never resting tongue,
and promises that he will be back in a few days, and that in the
meantime, should the citizens of Ballymoy have enough patriotism in
them to erect a statue of their great townie in the market place, he
would contribute a hundred pounds towards it._

_This sets the Doctor at work with even more (if possible) vim. He
gets Doyle to promise to contribute ten pounds, the parish priest_
_(though it nearly breaks the good father's heart) ten also, Major
Kent, the local landlord, another ten, and keeps the list
himself--explaining that it is not necessary for him to put himself
down for anything for that reason._

_It develops that Doyle has a nephew in Dublin who is a mortuary
sculptor, and has a statue of some deceased citizen on hand which was
never paid for. This statue Doyle's nephew agrees to sell to Ballymoy
for some eighty-odd pounds. The Doctor arranges to buy it, thus
figuring that there will be a balance of twenty pounds out of the
American's contribution to divide among themselves. This pleases
Doyle, Father McCormack, and Golligher_ (_who form the statue
committee_) _very much; but unfortunately, it develops also that Doyle
has neglected to get the money from the American for the statue before
he left._

_This does not stump the Doctor in the least, however. Among his plans
for the unveiling of the statue is the appearance of Mary Ellen, the
servant in Doyle's hotel, as a green fairy, and the appearance of the
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to make a speech. He suggests that when the
Lord Lieutenant appears, they ask him for five hundred pounds for a
pier--as the town already has but five or six piers--and that the
money for the statue be taken out of that. The Major objects to this,
but the Doctor's ability to explain does not desert him, and the Major
is satisfied._

_The great day of the unveiling finally arrives. The statue from the
mortuary sculptor in Dublin is standing in the market place, with a
veil over it. A letter comes from the Lord Lieutenant to the effect
that he has never heard of General John Regan, can find no record of
him in any history of any country on the globe, and, in the person of
his aide de camp, Lord Al Blakeney, protests and accuses Ballymoy of
having put a hoax over on him and all that sort of bally rot, by
Jove._

_The Doctor rises to the occasion beautifully. The aide de camp is
made to make a speech as a representative of the Lord Lieutenant, and
Mary Ellen unveils the statue, disclosing a hideous caricature of a
grinning dead man in an ill-fitting business suit._

_At that moment the American appears, explains grandly that there is
no such man as General John Regan, and says that if the Doctor can
prove to him that the General is not a fiction he himself will give
the five hundred pounds for the pier--as, he says, "the show is worth
it!"_

_The Doctor merely asks the American to prove to the satisfaction of
the assembled townsfolk that the General does not exist_.

_Billing gives it up and writes out a check to the Doctor's order for
five hundred pounds, while the Doctor poses grandly before the cheers
of the assembled and admiring populace of Ballymoy._[2]

Here, too, is an outline which led to a very dramatic sermon. Obviously it is a satisfactory summary of the story underlying the sermon, but just what it would give a reader, if it were a perfect scenario, is lacking--namely, suggestion of the emotional treatment of the scenes which is to make them worth the manager's or actor's producing:

AT THE TOP OF THE TENEMENT

_The arrangement of the platform will suggest the bare condition of
the home in the first part of the sermon, and in the second part will
show the improved condition a year later._