Shouts and murmurs Author:Alexander Woollcott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill GUNPOWDER PLOTS A S a playgoer, I am a little weary of many ./iL too recurrent phenomena in the American theater, but of all things I resent most hotly... more » the employment of firearms to unnerve an audience. It is such a contemptible subterfuge. Your unscrupulous playwright resorts to it upon the most feeble excuses. When in doubt, brandish a revolver : that has been his little motto these many seasons. Whenever he feels that a maiden in distress, or an ominous shadow cast upon a window-blind, or a cry of terror heard off-stage is not quite enough to induce the desired agitation in the play-going bosom, he points a Colts forty- five at that bosom and feels that the drama has been rescued again. Draw a gun and you will draw an audience. There, apparently, is the first precept in that hardy manual, "How to Be a Playwright." I wonder. I wonder how many playgoers are, as I am,gun-shy—how many are, as I am, rendered dumbly miserable by the notice that a pistol is to play one of the leading roles in the piece of the evening. The stage revolver, harmless enough in itself, is one of the great American nuisances, like the ticket speculator and the dialect comedian and the forty-two-year-old ingenue. We bear up under them. But who likes them? I The purpose of the pistol in stage-craft is akin td the role of the harrow in agriculture, or the business of the masseur's fingers before the cold cream is applied. It brings the playgoer forward to the edge of his seat, induces a mild sweat, and leaves him in that state of taut nerves which makes him a pitiably easy victim to any suggestion the author may have in mind. I resent this because it is taking a base advantage. It is too easy. It is like cheating at solitaire. Your true playwright, like Frank Craven, is above such mean devic...« less