Dramas Structures

1
Dramas Structures
Designed by Michael Rasbury Works
Cited Barranger, Milly. Theatre- A Way of
Seeing. 5th edition. Chapter 6, Thomson Learning,
Inc., 2002.
6
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Lets Try to Define Drama- Again...

• Drama comes from the Greek word dran meaning
  to do or to act.
• Drama is a pattern of words and actions having
  the potential for doingor becoming living words
  or actions.
• Dialogue- words arranged in sequence to be spoken
  by actors
• Performability is the link between the
  playwrights dialogue and the actors speech.
• Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) described drama as
  mimesis- the imitation of human beings in action.

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Drama as Imitation

• Children at play tend to be like amateur
  playwrights because they often imitate reality by
  inventing games.
• Both Play and Drama have scenario, entertainment,
  fixed rules and an imitation of human behavior in
  common.
• Playwrights imitate the unknown as a way of
  mastering it.
• Dramas Chief Elements (according to Aristotle)
• Plot- arranged sequence of events with a
  beginning, middle and end
• Character- the human figures who undertake the
  plot
• Theme- the meaning or underlying idea
• Language- the language, including symbols and
  signs.
• Music- the music and the aural elements of the
  play.
• Spectacle- all the visual elements
• Time and Action are also important but usually
  not added to these six chief elements.

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Common Play Structures

• The structure of the play is the manner in which
  the playwright organizes the dialogue into a
  meaningful and coherent whole.
• In Western Drama, plot and action are based on a
  central conflict that is confronted using
  complication, crisis, and climax.
• This variance of this pattern gives the play its
  structure.
• Climatic Structures (Causal structure)
• Climatic structure contains incidents that can be
  seen to lie along a line of causality from a
  beginning to an end.
• Causality- the belief that human events have
  causes and therefore consequences as a result,
  events are seen as joined in a chain of cause and
  effect.

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Common Play Structures

• Episodic Structure
• Episodic structure traces characters through a
  journey to a final action. Our view of the
  episodes helps us to explore the characters and
  know what the journey meant.
• Sometimes, a full range of possibilities remain
  available to the characters until the very end.
• Episodic plays can cover many years and locales
  in one play. This allows the characters to keep a
  full range of possibilities unlike climatic
  structure
• Episodic structure is loose in nature and
  allows characters to pass through situations
  instead of getting caught in them.

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Common Play Structures

• Situational Structure
• The situation shapes the course of the play-
  typically found in Absurdist plays. A circular
  plot replaces the journey or the causality.
• What happens on stage often transcends and
  contradicts what is said on stage.
• The tonal and rhythmic quality of the word is
  often more important than the literal meaning

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New Play Structures

• Solo Text
• Solo texts usually come in the form of highly
  personal responses to very current social
  issues.
• low-budget
• effective means of speaking directly to Americans
• These solo texts have been around for hundreds of
  years since medieval times (mimes and jugglers)-
  but recently have become a very popular type of
  minimalistic theatre.
• Spaulding Gray turned his impressions and
  autobiographical stories into theatre.
• Gray improvised his memories, emotions and other
  free associations to create a narrative.
• He used bought and found objects as properties to
  allow free association and formalized his stories
  before a small group.
• Gray finalized the text after talking to the
  audience about it.

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New Play Structures

• Monodrama
• The monodrama is a modern experimentalist form,
  in which a playwright presents the conscious and
  unconscious though of the speaker.
• This is accomplished using tape recorders,
  voice-overs, and other technology.
• Theatre of Images
• Playwrights rebel against just the use of words
  and old-fashioned verbal texts, and instead
  create theatrical events dominated by visual and
  aural events.
• These can be likened to a painters collage with
  actors placed against large shapes, loud sounds,
  sculpted images, etc.

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Designed by Michael Rasbury Works
Cited Barranger, Milly. Theatre- A Way of
Seeing. 5th edition. Chapter 6, Thomson Learning,
Inc., 2002.
6
Dramas Structures