Irritating personality

A mistake made all too frequently by writers of stories as well as of plays is the creation of an irritating personality. Your hero or heroine may be unpleasant, wicked—anything but aggravating. Even successful writers make this blunder—and blunder it certainly is because of its effect. Several years ago a play went on in New York which was exceedingly, yet one came away dissatisfied, vaguely annoyed. Why? Because one had spent an hour and a half in the society of a woman from whom one would ordinarily have fled in ten minutes—or else slapped her. Sev eral years ago, a dramatist, experienced enough to have known better, presented as his heroine a girl for whom one finally lost all sympathy in a desire to shake her for her silliness. The part was well- played by an actress who seemed to have full com¬prehension of the reasons back of the girl's notions. Yet I well remember that at a certain point in the dialogue of the last act of The Harvest Moon, by which time the audience should have taken the girl to its heart if it ever intended doing so, a woman seated near me gave an impatient shrug of her shoul¬ders and that unspellable little click of the tongue and teeth so expressive of annoyance.

Sometimes a character may be of this irritating variety to point a contrast, but the audience should be given the satisfaction of seeing him given his just deserts. The public, en mane, is always virtu¬ous and likes to see its unpleasant people punished in some way. An audience wishes to either have the villain reform, or be punished, or, at best, " foiled " in his attempt on the unhappiness of others. This feeling is entirely natural and not to be lightly ignored without some risk. Other things in the play must overbalance any failure in this direction. An example comes to mind in that very successful play, As a Man Thinks, in which a neglect of just retribu¬tion is glossed by the skill in play-writing and the motive of the play itself. But many unregenerate in the audience—and I think the author would be sur¬prised at the number whenever this play eame up for discussion—were so disgusted and irritated by the detestable character in question that they could see no reason why he should have been given the oppor¬tunity at the end to assume the magnanimously for¬giving attitude of the hero in a melodrama. I know personally of people who deliberately stayed away from the performance because of a dislike to being further " riled " than they had been by the mere reading of the reviews of the play's story. The splen¬did acting of all the characters served to take away some of this annoyance at the actual performance. This matter of unpleasant characters must be han¬dled very carefully. A certain manager once ex¬pressed himself thus forcibly : "If I haven't at least two characters in a piece an audience can love, I don't produce the play."