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30 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Melodrama | The plot is good versus evil. Star Wars is an example of melodrama |
| Tragicomedy | A sad story with a happy ending |
| tragedy | - A serious play that makes you feel exhilarated because the hero's experience teaches you some profound truth about your life and affirms that your worst expectations about life are true. |
| goat song | also known as tragedy. The word derives from the ancient Greek religious ceremonies at which a god was sometimes depicted as having attributes of a goat. |
| Farce | genre associated with anarchic and unbelievable situations. The film Death at a Funeral is an example of a farce. |
| domestic comedy | Topics focus on family issues. |
| Poetics | Written by Aristotle, the earliest known essay analyzing theatre. |
| unity of action | According to Aristotle, a play should have one main action with few or no subplots. |
| Linear | the description of a plot of a play where the action develops in chronological order without flashbacks |
| cinematic | Where the arrangement of the plot presents flashbacks and subjective scenes other than chronological order. |
| Action | an event that changes the status quo in the plot of the play |
| status quo | the stable situations at the beginning of a plot, before the dramatic question is asked. |
| turning point | the part in the play when a change happens that inevitably leads to the answering of the dramatic question. Also known as the crisis. |
| major dramatic question | - the question posed early on in the play and keeps the audience interested until it is answered at the plot's resolution. |
| inciting event | The point in the plot when the major dramatic question is asked. |
| Character | The agents for the action |
| Dialogue | The speeches the characters say. The playwright's primary material. |
| Obstacle | What a character has to overcome to achieve their objective. |
| realism | A style of theatrical production and dramatic writing that imitates selected traits of the language and appearance of everyday life. |
| role/roll | The entirety of a character's part in a play |
| objective | The character's main goal |
| Constantin Stanislavsky | The Russia n actor/director who developed a widely used system for analyzing a character. |
| emotional recall | When an actor remembers how he or she felt in a similar situation in real life and substitutes that feeling for the character's emotional state during the performance of a role. |
| audition | a tryout for a part in a play |
| agent | A person who represents an actor by soliciting employment and negotiating contracts in exchange for 10 percent of the actor's salary. |
| call back | When an actor gets asked back for a second reading for a part in a play. |
| diction | The choice, sequence, and arrangement of the playwright's words |
| Thought | main idea or theme |
| spectacle | the visual aspects of a production |
| plot | Aristotle said that the plot was the "life and soul of the drama". |
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