16^th November Lesson

Drama

What is drama?

"...drama is not made of words alone, but of sights and sounds, stillness and motion, noise and silence, relationship and responses".

J.L. Styan, Drama, Stage and Audience, 1975

One of the features of the drama is stage directions, which are information given by the playwright.

1. What comes to your mind in association with the word "drama"?

Drama is a literary genre written to be performed. It is distinguished into plays, tragedies, comedies and farces.

1. What has drama in common with poetry?

Drama, poetry and fiction are very similar because they are written and they have the function to express something.  

They are made of raw materials, which are words, and of different sounds.

Drama creates interactions with the audience. But in drama there is no intermediary between the audience and the action on the stage, there is no narrator as in fiction and no speaker as in poetry.

Drama is different from poetry and fiction because the characters, when they act, involve the audience within the representation.

Drama creates direct interactions with audience.

Drama

The Tools

Playwright's tools:

• Dialogue: conversation between two or more characters.
• Monologue: speech made by a character to others who do not reply.
• Soliloquy: speech made by a character when alone on the stage.
• Aside: comment made by a character for the audience only.

The text of a play is a dialogue, which is a conversation between two or more characters. Dialogue has different purposes:

• it shows characters in interaction, revealing aspects of their personality;
• allows the action to develop through what they say. 
•  help the audience to understand what is going on and to create expectation about what will come next.

Stage directions are the playwright's instructions about the use of face, voice, the kind of movement, gesture, body language, lighting and set.

The chain of action and reaction is the plot.

Plays come to life in performance where actors speak and move as the characters in the play might do and the performance is controlled by the director.

Sets or scenery like windows, furniture, stairways and the like indicate a specific place or create a particular atmosphere. Props, instead, are movable objects such chairs, trees, which mark scene changes.

Lighting can highlight individual characters, isolate various parts of the stage while costumes and makeup contribute to make plays memorable because they help the audience to understand the play's time period and the character's social class, role and age.

Besides plays require an interaction between actors and audience. The spectators are in the darkness but their reactions to the onstage action provide feedback to the actors and can therefore influence the performance.

Traditional plays are organized into acts, which are organized into scene.

In traditional plays the time of the performance is the same of the time of the plot.

Dictionary:

•  Drama: 1. a play for acting on stage, radio etc especially one with high emotional content; 2. the dramatic art; the composition and presentation of plays.
• To quote: citare
• Quotation: citazione
• Play: rappresentazione
• Floor: pavimento (dove si parla)
• Curtain: sipario
• On side = di lato
• To stage = mettere su uno spettacolo
• To set-set-set = ambientare
•  Mutual = reciproco
•  Storyline: events facts and places
•   Plot: the way the events are narrated.