Drama's Conventions: Tools for Effective Communication in Theatre

1. Chapter 7 – Drama’s Conventions All that lives by the fact of living, has a form, and by the same token must die—except the work of art which lives forever in so far as it is form. —Luigi Pirandello

2. Chapter Summary • Playwrights have common strategies for developing plot, character, and action, for manipulating time, and for ending plays. • Taken all together, dramatic conventions are agreed-upon ways to communicate information and experience to audiences.

3. Writing Strategies: Stage Directions • Instructions for director, designers, and performers • Includes facts about: • Setting • Props and scenery • Music cues • General impressions of stage environment • Usually developed by playwright

4. Writing Strategies: Stage Directions • Tennessee Williams’s stage directions for A Streetcar Named Desire (excerpt): The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields and runs between the L & N tracks and the river. The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm. The houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quaintly ornamented gables. . . .

5. Writing Strategies: Stage Directions • Shakespeare: • Information about time, place, mood presented mostly through dialogue (“weather lines”) • First 11 lines of Hamlet: • Place (“castle battlements”) • Time (“’Tis now struck twelve”) • Weather (“’Tis bitter cold”) • Mood (“I am sick at heart”) • Action (“Not a mouse stirring”)

6. Writing Strategies: Exposition • Information about what’s going on, what has happened (antecedent action), and characters • Classical exposition: • Usually conveyed through dialogue • Often presented in formal prologue to action of play • Modern exposition: • Usually conveyed through dialogue • Less formal: information presented in casual exchanges between characters

7. Writing Strategies: Point of Attack • Refers to moment early in the play when story begins • Macbeth: • Scene in which King Duncan learns of victory in battle • Point of departure for action of play

8. Writing Strategies: Plot • Complication: • Unexpected development that increases emotional intensity • Usually toward middle of play • Crisis: • Turning point of action • Event that makes resolution of the plays conflict inevitable • Climax: • Moment at which conflict is resolved • Point of highest emotional intensity

9. Writing Strategies: Plot • Resolutions and endings: • Restores balance to world of play • Satisfies audiences expectations • In absurdist plays, represented in completion of cycle

10. Writing Strategies: Plot • Simultaneous plots: • Two stories told concurrently • Used to represent life’s variety and complexity • Secondary plot (subplot) resolved before main plot

11. Conventions of Time: Dramatic vs. Actual Time • Audiences experience time on different levels: • Actual duration of play • Dramatic time (time span covered in world of play) • In play, time may be expanded or compressed: • Time may jump forward or backward by months, years. • Chronological sequence may be disrupted. • Unity of time (Aristotle): • Actions of play should unfold in real time.

12. Conventions of Metaphor: Figurative Language • Metaphor: • Equating two unlike objects • “The moon is a balloon.” • Simile: • Comparing two unlike objects using like, as, than, or similar to • “The moon is like a balloon.”

13. The Play-within-the-Play • A favorite technique of Elizabethan playwrights • Examples: • Shakespeare’s Hamlet: • Hamlet stages a performance of The Murder of Gonzago to assess Claudius’ guilt. • Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle: • Narrator links inner play (chalk-circle test) with outer play (dispute over land).

14. The Play-within-the-Play • Modern applications: • Used to highlight life’s theatricality • Stage a metaphor for self-imposed illusions • Example: • Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade: • Depicts production of a play by inmates of insane asylum

15. Core Concepts • Drama’s conventions are a set of time-honored tools for communicating with audiences. • There are conventions for providing background information, manipulating time, ending plays, and telling more than one story at a time. • The insertion of an inner play within the larger one was a favorite device of Elizabethan writers to enliven the production’s theatrics. • In the modern theatre, the play-within-the-play is a means of demonstrating life’s theatricality.