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DRAMATURGY 35
lives of your major characters or else their presence would be gratuitous.
Minors are human too. But at the same time, these minor characters have lives of their own which cause them to become complicated with those of the major characters. To round out these minor characters so that they can become clothed with essential depth and third-dimensional realism it is necessary that they too be motivated by well defined, natural character traits. For unless they are well developed, their connections with the major characters will become clouded with unreality. As a result, the actions of the major characters, no matter how realistically they may have been presented, will suffer because they will reflect the unreality of the minor characters.
But because they are minor characters, and because they are presented only for brief periods, they must be developed quickly. This can be done in dialogue and action. Often this is accomplished with foreign or regional accents— by making the characters Brooklyn cabbies, Irish cops, or cockney maids.
But this is not enough. It is necessary to present them, not only as sounding like Brooklyn cab drivers, but acting like them as well. In addition, they must not be presented as cliched types, to be seen in hundreds of other pictures, but as individuals. The cab driver, for example, can be given to complaining constantly of traffic cops— a persecution complex. Or, instead of dialogue, he can be characterized by a bit of identifying pantomime— a peculiar grin, an ugly leer, or even a tic. Una O'Connor's mincing walk, in the minor role of the cockney maid in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, was a fine example of this type of characterizing. The same actress' nervous cough in Cluny Brown was another excellent bit of characterization that gave major proportions to a minor character's part.
Each minor character should be given something— either in dialogue or action— that will endow him with a quality of reality, so that in his relations with the major characters, his genuineness will be reflected in their scenes together.
The writer has a difficult problem, though, in presenting minor characters for a half-hour television film. Because of the comparative lack of time, there is insufficient footage available for developing them. But they should be present to be used as foils for the major characters and also for comedy relief. And the lack of time