I
IDEAS

Play in which revolutionist in big scene—“Kill me,” etc.— displays all bourgeois talents hitherto emphasized, paralyzes them with his superiority, and then shoots them.

Lois and the bear hiding in the Yellowstone.

For Play.

Personal charm.

Elsa Maxwell.

Bert.

Hotels.

Pasts—great maturity of characters.

Children—their sex and incomprehension of others.

Serious work and worker involved. No more patience with idlers unless about them.

Helpmate: Man running for Congress gets hurt in line of other duty and while he’s unconscious his wife, on bad advice, plans to run in his stead. She makes a fool of herself. He saves her face.

Family breaks up. It leaves mark on three children, two of whom ruin themselves keeping a family together and a third who doesn’t.

A young woman bill collector undertakes to collect a ruined man’s debts. They prove to be moral as well as financial.

* * * *  * * * * running away from it all and finding that new ménage is just the same.

Widely separated family inherit a house and have to live there together.

Fairy who fell for wax dummy.

Three people caught in triangle by desperation. Don’t resolve it geographically, so it is crystallized and they have to go on indefinitely living that way.

Andrew Fulton, a facile character who can do anything, is married to a girl who can’t express herself. She has a growing jealousy of his talents. The night of her musical show for the Junior League comes and is a great failure. He takes hold and saves the piece and can’t understand why she hates him for it. She has interested a dealer secretly in her pictures (or designs or sculptures) and plans to make an independent living. But the dealer has only been sold on one specimen. When he sees the rest he shakes his head. Andrew in a few minutes turns out something in putty and the dealer perks up and says, “That’s what we want.” She is furious.

A Funeral: His own ashes kept blowing in his eyes. Everything was over by six and nothing remained but a small man to mark the spot. There were no flowers requested or proffered. The corpse stirred faintly during the evening but otherwise the scene was one of utter quietude.

Story of a man trying to live down his crazy past and encountering it everywhere.

A tree, finding water, pierces roof and solves a mystery.

Father teaches son to gamble on fixed machine; later the son unconsciously loses his girl on it.

A criminal confesses his crime methods to a reformer, who uses them that same night.

Girl and giraffe.

Marionettes during dinner party meeting and kissing.

Play opens with man run over.

Play about a whole lot of old people—terrible things happen to them and they don’t really care.

The man who killed the idea of tanks in England—his after life.

Play: The Office—an orgy after hours during the boom.

A bat chase. Some desperate young people apply for jobs at Camp, knowing nothing about wood lore but pretending, each one.

The Tyrant Who Had To Let His Family Have Their Way For One Day.

The Dancer Who Found She Could Fly.

There was once a moving picture magnate who was shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing but two dozen cans of film.

Angered by a hundred rejection slips, he wrote an extraordinarily good story and sold it privately to twenty different magazines. Within a single fortnight it was thrust twenty times upon the public. The headstone was contributed by the Authors’ League.

Driving over the rooftops on a bet.

Girl whose ear is so sensitive she can hear radio. Man gets her out of insane asylum to use her.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

A man hates to be a prince, goes to Hollywood and has to play nothing but princes. Or a general—the same.

Girl marries a dissipated man and keeps him in healthy seclusion. She meanwhile grows restless and raises hell on the side.