Theater

115 flashcards by MentisLibrary

Dramatic structure from Aristotle to Freytag, the major genres and periods, the playwrights and plays that define the repertory, acting method vocabulary, blocking and staging, and the technical and design roles that put a show on stage.

What are the six elements of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics, in his order of importance?
Plot, character, thought, diction, melody and spectacle.
What is hamartia?
The error or misjudgement by which a tragic character brings about their own downfall.
What is peripeteia?
The reversal: the moment the action turns to its opposite, so a character's efforts produce the result they were trying to avoid.
What is anagnorisis?
The recognition: a change from ignorance to knowledge, usually of who someone really is or what the character has really done.
What is catharsis?
The purging or clarification of pity and fear that Aristotle says tragedy produces in its audience.
What are the three unities?
Unity of action, of time and of place. Aristotle argued for unity of action; Italian and French critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries added the other two as rules.
What is Freytag's Pyramid?
Gustav Freytag's 1863 model of five-part dramatic structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and catastrophe or resolution.
What is the inciting incident?
The event that disturbs the situation the play opens with and sets the main action in motion.
What is exposition?
The information about the situation, the past and the relationships that an audience needs in order to follow the play.
What is dramatic irony?
The situation where the audience knows something a character on stage does not.
What is a denouement?
The unwinding after the climax, in which consequences are settled and the situation reaches its new stable state.
What is subtext?
What a character means, wants or feels underneath what they actually say.
What is a beat in a script?
The smallest unit of action, a single exchange in which one thing is pursued. The beat changes when the subject, tactic or balance of power shifts.
What is a French scene?
A division of a play marked by the entrance or exit of a character, so the scene changes whenever the group on stage changes.
What is a deus ex machina?
A resolution imposed from outside the logic of the play, from the crane that lowered a god onto the Greek stage.
Soliloquy, monologue and aside
A soliloquy is a speech by a character alone on stage, thinking aloud. A monologue is a long uninterrupted speech to other characters. An aside is a short remark heard by the audience but supposedly not by the others.
What is the fourth wall?
The imagined transparent wall between the stage and the audience through which the audience watches a self-contained world.
What is a chorus in Greek drama?
A group of performers who sing, chant and move together, commenting on the action, questioning the characters and representing the community.
What is a well-made play?
The tightly engineered nineteenth-century form associated with Eugène Scribe: careful exposition, a withheld secret, escalating complications, a scene of revelation and a neat resolution.
Realism versus naturalism
Realism presents ordinary life in believable settings and speech. Naturalism goes further, treating character as the product of heredity and environment and pursuing exhaustive surface detail.
What is epic theatre?
Brecht's theatre of demonstration rather than illusion, in which the audience watches critically, the mechanics are exposed and the story is presented as one that could have gone otherwise.
What is the Verfremdungseffekt?
Brecht's alienation or estrangement effect: staging that makes the familiar look strange so the audience thinks about it instead of simply identifying with it.
What is the Theatre of the Absurd?
The term Martin Esslin coined in 1961 for postwar plays that dramatise a world without reliable meaning through circular action, degraded language and inconclusive endings.
What defines tragedy as a genre?
Serious drama in which a central figure comes to ruin, traditionally through their own choices, ending in death or irreparable loss.
What defines comedy as a genre?
Drama that moves from disorder toward reconciliation, typically ending in marriage, reunion or restored community, and licensing laughter at human folly.
What is tragicomedy?
A play that mixes tragic and comic elements, or that carries a threat of disaster and then averts it.
What is melodrama?
A popular nineteenth-century form with clear moral opposition, heightened emotion, sensational incident and, originally, music under the dialogue.
What is farce?
Comedy driven by improbable situations, mistaken identity, physical business, precise timing and doors.
What is satire in the theatre?
Drama that attacks folly, vice or power by exaggerating it, usually with a real target outside the play.
What is commedia dell'arte?
The Italian professional improvised comedy of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, played in masks by touring troupes using stock characters and scenarios rather than scripts.