...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

Play: rappresentazione/testo teatrale

Playwright: drammaturgo

Quotation: citazione

Curtain: sipario

On side: di lato

Mutually: reciprocamente

Regardless:incurante

Stillness: tranquillità

To quote: citare

To stage: allestire uno spettacolo

-What is drama?

Drama is a literary genre which is conceived to be performed and it includes tragedies, comedies and farces. Traditional plays are organized into acts, which are organized into scenes, where the time of the performance and the time of the plot are the same. Modern plays are commonly named "one-act play".

-What has drama in common with poetry?

Drama is closely similar to poetry because they aim to express something in a different language from everyday one; besides they are made of raw materials, which are words, and are based on different sounds. Both genres steer emotions. However, in drama there is no intermediary between the audience and the action on the stage and no speaker as in poetry.

-What makes drama special compared to other literary genres?

Drama is special because the characters, during the performance, involve the whole audience within the representation. Besides drama is a dynamic text compared to poetry.

-What can a playwright use in order to write a dramatic text?

He can use specific tools, like:

Scene: the time of the performance and the time of the scene are the same.

Dialogue: conversation between two or more characters.

Monologue: speech made by a character to others who are supposed not to reply.

Soliloquy: speech made by a character when alone on the stage.

Aside: comment made by a character for the audience.

The plot consists of all events, facts, consequences that constitute a text. On the other hand, the storyline is the way in which events and facts are arranged by the writer.

Drama has got its own conventions and they who study it are supposed to know these conventions.

One of the feature of the drama is stage directions, which are instructions given by the playwright to perform the text. Stage directions are the playwright's instructions about how using face, voice, kind of movements, gesture, body language, lighting and set.

When we speak about drama, we should analyse how language( one of the playwright's most important tools) is used.

The text of a play is a dialogue, that is a conversation between two or more characters and it can have different purposes, for example showing characters in interaction or revealing aspects of their personality.

Theatre is made up of characters, which embody ideas, attitudes and symbolise human vices and virtues. In addition, characters make the audience understand what is happening and they create expectations about what will come next.

The theme of a dramatic text is something to get to after a deeply different analysis from the one you carry out of other literary text.

Sets or sceneries like windows, furniture, stairways and so on indicate a specific place and create a particular atmosphere. Props, instead, are movable objects such as chairs, trees, which are used to mark scene changes.