Los Angeles herald., 1905-08-28
FAMOUS ACTOR
IS PLAYWRIGHT
EDMUND DAY HAS A NATIONAL
REPUTATION
HAS NEVER MADE A FAILURE
Builds His Own Sketches and Fur
nlshes Vaudeville stunts for
others--ls Writing Play
for Corbett
HAS NEVER MADE A FAILURE

vaudeville sketches are the hardest
form of dramatic composition. They
must be all action, yet the story must
be condensed into twenty or thirty min
utes of time-often the shorter period
And you must start, tell and finish a
complete story while an ordinary play
would be only beginning. 1t is the
tabloid drama and because It must be
made the most comprehensive in yet
the shortest time, 1t therefore Is the
highest form of dramatic art"
Edmund Day, now at the Orpheum, is
Saone of the three or four successful
writer's of sketches for vaudeville use.
He does them for himself and for
others. SO do Will M. Cressy and EN-
NETT Corrigan. 1t would be hard to
recall now the name of another such
writer offhand. Day has put out many
sketches and has never yet made a
failure. And he has many more orders
than he can fill. Talking of this SEEM
ingly simple but really complex form
of theatrical expression yesterday, he
went on:
Few Parts Required
There can be only one thought ex-
pressed in a sketch. 1t will not permit
of many parts. 1t will not allow a
concrete plot. You are dealing with
primal emotions in primal way. You
have to strip your subject of all ex-
traneous verbiage and all unnecessary
action and get right down to the bone
and marrow of the thing. You haven't
time for more.
Nov, you try to say simple thing
in simple way and see how bald and
direct it is. There is no feeling to it;
no lfrills' as you might say. So you
haven't done anything you can't dra-
Matte an abstract proposition Hence
you must go Il step farther and pre-
sent the tabloid extract of life in a
way that will attract.
There is where you are betwixt
Scylla and Charybdis. For the moment
you go to extremes in expression you
have ruined the simplicity of your
sketch, and yet if you don't have
enough meat in 1t to cover the bones,
you will not interest your public. Just
as the short story is the best of liter
ary art, so is the sketch the premier in
dramatics. And as the French excel
in one, so do they in the other.
Last Line First
"As for myself, it would be difficult
to tell you how proceed. Take The
Sheriff. for instance the one 1 am now
playing that was built up from the
last line-the one where 1 say: oh,
hell, nobody loves a fat man. In other
words, it all leads up to that situation
and that was the first thing that
wrote in 1T. I labored for many days on
that sketch; several times I went away
and forgot it and yet only to return to
it. 1t worked itself out in the end. 1t
is not perfect; nothing Is. But it goes.
Action you must have; it has that, al
though not all that would like. You
must have humor; vaudeville audi
ences want to laugh; and you must
have love story. Then must come a
climax that will fix the sketch in the
public mind; give people something to
talk about and to remember. That, in
this case, is all contained in the brief
space during which 1 hold the center
of the stage, roll a cigarette, light 1t
and express my disgust in the words
given. That is why I wrote that last
line first; 1 then had my keynote; the
rest 1 built up around it. OF course ]
have studied to have it atmospherically
correct and true and 1 believe it is.'
Writing Other Plays
Day is more, however, than even
sketch writer or vaudevillian. He is
also dramatist. For J. j. Corbett.
Hal Davis and Inez Macauley he wrote
Pals" which for two seasons was a
great hit in the east 1t was eIabor-
Rted from a vaudeville sketch and, like
"The Sheriff." it had one central fea-
ture-a most destructive stage fight
during which the elaborate furnishings
of reception hall were smashed to
bits, fine staircase wrecked and a
dilapidation brought about that was
hard to imagine.
He is now working on another play
for Corbett which will be done for next
season. He is a famous athlete. swim
mer and all-around good fellow, well
off in this worlds goods, with charm
ing wife-Polly Winston, who is with
him In the sketch-and well on the road
to fortune. He started as a newspaper
man. George w. Day. the funny mono
logue man. is his brother.
The Grand
That world-old problem why Wo-
men Sim the Grand opera house Is