Notes about the lesson on November 15th, 2011.

DRAMA AND DRAMA TOOLS

Drama has its own conventions and those who study drama should know these conventions. Drama includes comedies, tragedies and farces; these are texts conceived to be performed.

Stage directions are one of the features of drama. They tell the director how to perform the play on the stage.

Drama steers emotions, like poetry, using characters’ relationships; however drama and poetry tools are different.

Drama tools are very different from narrative ones. For instance, drama tools are lighting, scenery, costumes and makeup. To express characters’ emotions and thoughts, a playwright can use dialogues, monologues (a speech to a character who does not reply), soliloquies (a speech by a character when he is alone; it is used to let the audience know the character’s thoughts) and asides (comments made by a character about a situation or another character, on the side of the stage; they are intended for the audience only).

A play can be structured in different ways. We can have one-act plays (usually modern plays), while ancient plays are generally organized into several acts, which are organized into scenes. In a scene the time of the performance and the time of the scene itself is the same.

It is always important to analyze how language is used in a play (e.g. in modern plays language is usually colloquial, while Shakespeare used poetical language).

The theme (or the themes) of a dramatic text is something the intelligent reader gets when he analyzes deeper.

A sequence of events composes the storyline. The way events are organized, the language used by different characters, costumes and lighting are all elements which give an impression to the audience and they are often important to understand the theme of the play.