Drama comes from Greek words meaning "to do" or "to act." A play is
a story acted out. It shows people going through some eventful
period in their lives, seriously or humorously. The speech and
action of a play recreate the flow of human life. A play comes fully
to life only on the stage. On the stage it combines many arts those
of the author, director, actor, designer, and others. Dramatic
performance involves an intricate process of rehearsal based upon
imagery inherent in the dramatic text. A playwright first invents a
drama out of mental imagery. The dramatic text presents the drama as
a range of verbal imagery. The language of drama can range between
great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely theatrical and
ritualistic manner; and on the other, an almost exact reproduction
of real life. A dramatic monologue is a type of lyrical poem or
narrative piece that has a person speaking to a select listener and
revealing his character in a dramatic situation.
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Classification of Dramatic Plays
In a strict sense, plays are classified as being either
tragedies or
comedies. The broad difference between the two is in
the ending. Comedies end happily. Tragedies end on an unhappy note.
The tragedy acts as a purge. It arouses our pity for the stricken
one and our terror that we ourselves may be struck down. As the play
closes we are washed clean of these emotions and we feel better for
the experience. A classical tragedy tells of a high and noble person
who falls because of a "tragic flaw," a weakness in his own
character. A domestic tragedy concerns the lives of ordinary people
brought low by circumstances beyond their control. Domestic tragedy
may be realistic seemingly true to life or naturalistic realistic
and on the seamy side of life. A romantic comedy is a love story.
The main characters are lovers; the secondary characters are comic.
In the end the lovers are always united. Farce is comedy at its
broadest. Much fun and horseplay enliven the action. The comedy of
manners, or artificial comedy, is subtle, witty, and often mocking.
Sentimental comedy mixes sentimental emotion with its humor.
Melodrama has a plot filled with pathos and menacing threats by a
villain, but it does include comic relief and has a happy ending. It
depends upon physical action rather than upon character probing.
Tragic or comic, the action of the play comes from conflict of
characters how the stage people react to each other. These reactions
make the play.
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How to write a Play?
"Plays are not written, they are re-written" is a myth. Once you've
written your dialogue, 80% of any help we might have given is
eliminated. The major choices, about story and character, have been
made and a commitment made. The earlier a play is brought to the
table, the more help can be effectively applied. With this sort of
pre-dialogue work our aim is: get it right the first time.
Structure - a play's story and the way of placing it onstage - is
the key element in determining effective character and dialogue.
Characters are known not by what they say, but rather, by what they
do. Dialogue is most effective as a reflection of intent, in
communicating dramatic movement. Primary attention to structure,
therefore, insures a proper perspective on developing a play's other
elements.
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Characters and Story
In a dramatic story or play, the dynamic characters draw in an
audience because they promise to take a story's audience on a
journey to experience a story's fulfillment. The key issue to
understand is that it is because characters in stories act out to
resolution issues of human need that they engage the attention of an
audience. When introducing a story's characters, then, writers need
to suggest in some way that their characters are "ripe." This means
that a character has issues that arise from a story's dramatic
purpose and the story's events compel them to resolve it. For
example, if courage is the main issue in a story, the storyteller
can set a character into an environment designed to compel them to
act. That's how a story's dramatic purpose is made visible. It
establishes both why characters act and why a story's audience
should care. Viewers want to care, to believe in the possibility of
what a story's characters can accomplish. In that way they
experience that belief in themselves. That's why a storyteller often
arranges a story's elements to deliberately beat down and place
characters in great danger, so the story's readers can more
powerfully experience their rising up unconquered. Just as we
secretly imagine ourselves, standing in their shoes, doing as well.
Once the storyteller understands the role their characters serve for
an audience, they can better perceive why such characters should be
introduced in a particular manner: In a way an audience can
understand and identify with a particular character and their goals.
In a way that the audience is led to care about the outcome of a
character's goals and issues while also perceiving how they advance
the story toward its resolution and fulfillment. That's why it's
important a storyteller introduce characters in a way that allows an
audience the time to take in who the characters are and what issues
they have to resolve. Often limiting the number of characters
introduced in a scene can do this simply. Many popular movies, for
example, have only one or two main characters in a scene. Large
group scenes are the exception, not the rule. The purpose of this is
so the audience can clearly identify with an understand a
character's issues. Second, the actions of a story's characters
should advance a story toward its resolution and fulfillment along
its story and plot lines in a discernible way. If characters serve
no dramatic purpose in a scene -- if their actions don't serve to
advance the story -- save their introduction for a later time.
Characters in a story should be designed by the storyteller to have
emotions that suggest how they will react to a story's events. As an
example, a story about courage, characters might confront their
feelings about lacking courage. That's the internal side of the
equation. The storyteller then puts them into an environment that
compels them to react. By how they react, they set out the story's
dramatic purpose and give voice to their feelings and concerns as
the action of the story exerts pressure on them. By resolving
questions based on the inner conflicts of characters, a story has
meaning to those in the audience with similar feelings and issues.
Story events that have no real effect on a character's inner
feelings -- a character's sense of mattering -- serve no purpose in
a story. Worse, they can confuse an audience. They see characters
with certain issues reacting to events that don't clearly elicit
those responses. Or that elicit responses that seem out of sync with
what they know about a character. Or a character's issues have been
kept hidden in a way the audience has no way to feel engaged over
how or why characters are responding to a story's events. The deeper
issue here is that the storyteller have a sense of how the types of
characters that populate a story arise from a story's dramatic
purpose. That their emotions arise from setting out that purpose.
That the events of the story clearly compel those characters to
respond based on a sense of who they are. That all of these are
blended together to recreate a story's journey along its story line
from its introduction to its fulfillment. Well-told stories
populated with dynamic, dramatic characters with larger than life
passions and needs act out issues those in the audience might
struggle with. Such characters battling with other determined
characters to shape a story's course and outcome bring a story's
dramatic purpose to life in a fulfilling way. Creating such
characters is another art in the craft of storytelling.
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How to make a story more dramatic?
To understand writing "in the dramatic moment," one should start
with an understanding of the dramatic purpose of a story. A story,
through its use of words, images and sounds creates for its audience
the effect of a quality of movement toward resolution/fulfillment of
a story's issues and events. To make a story's world feel/ring
"true," every element in a story -- words, images, characters,
events, ideas, environment -- must have a purpose that connects it
with a story's overall dramatic purpose. Starting with an
understanding of a story's overall dramatic purpose, writers can
begin to see down into the interior of their stories, into the
particular words and images that best bring them to life. To
understand the individual words and images that compose a story and
make it deeply felt, then, one can follow a series of steps. First,
start with understanding the larger context of what a story's about.
To understand a story's overall dramatic purpose, start with its
premise. A premise identifies a story's core dramatic issue, its
movement toward resolution, and what type of fulfillment that
resolution sets up for the story's audience. A story is then
populated with characters who feel the pull of a story's core
dramatic issue, and the issues and events that arise from this issue
being acted out. A story's events are those that best act out a
story's dramatic movement from introduction to
resolution/fulfillment. A story's physical terrain arises from what
dramatizes a story's action. A story's emotional terrain arises from
the emotions a story's events and issues elicit from its characters.
To engage an audience, a story's events and the goals of its
characters are set up as a story and scene questions suggesting a
dramatic need for action/resolution. As characters act and react to
a story's events and environment, the story's audience is led to
internalize a story's movement to experience its
resolution/fulfillment. To write deeply "in the dramatic moment,"
one must see a story not as a series of happenings enlivened for an
audience by how they are described and recreated, but a series of
events that each have an interconnected dramatic purpose that arises
from a particular role in acting out a story dramatically. To
understand how to write "in the dramatic moment," then, one must
understand the dramatic purpose of each step/event/moment in a
story, and write in a way that heightens the dramatic effect of that
moment as it relates to all the "moments" in the story, and the
overall sense of how that communicates a story's dramatic purpose.
For example, writing about courage "in the moment" isn't trying to
set up a step/event/happening to propel characters toward a story's
resolution of courage. It's setting up for the audience an
experience of courage in the moment of its happening through the
outcome of a dramatic situation that is given meaning by its
relationship to the story's dramatic purpose. To create this
heightened dramatic effect, one must trim away all that has no
dramatic purpose in the scene. In a novel, this means that one
doesn't describe a situation to make it "real," i.e., a recreation
of what a room "looks" like. One describes a room according to the
dramatic purpose of a scene. Therefore, if very little information
about an environment (a particular room) is important to the
dramatic purpose of a scene, one doesn't expend too many words
describing it. To understand which words to use to describe the
scene, again start with an understanding of the dramatic purpose of
the story itself, and the relationship of the scene to the story as
a whole. Because the point is, again, not to make an environment, or
character, or event "real" in life-like terms, but to make it
dramatically "true" to the story's audience. For the screenwriter,
an understanding of the scene would guide them to focus on the
dialogue that heightens the drama of the moment. For the playwright,
understanding the dramatic purpose of a scene is to have a tool to
gauge what kind of dialogue these characters would have to bring
this scene to life. The writer who starts with the question, what's
the dramatic purpose of this scene? And how can it best be brought
to life, can begin to write scenes from the inside out. That is,
they can have characters speak directly to the dramatic issues at
stake in a scene, in relationship to what's at stake in the story
itself. Writers caught up in the notion that stories revolve around
resolution or recreating "reality" write to make statements about a
character's motives, why they respond as they do to a story's
events, what they say about a story's events. Or, they describe
events or places in a story as if it was the weight of description
will make them ring "true" for an audience. But an environment can
only be made to ring "true" to an audience to the degree that they
are set up to experience its dramatic purpose. An environment
without a dramatic purpose is simply dead weight, inert. Again, it's
because it's not the purpose of a story to recreate life, but to
recreate a dramatic experience for a story's audience.
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What makes a Drama a Drama?
- A dramatist should start with characters. The characters must be
full, rich, interesting, and different enough from each other so
that in one way or another they conflict. From this conflict comes
the story
- Put the characters into dramatic situations with strongly
plotted conclusions
- The plot should be able to tell what happens and why
- The beginning, should tell the audience or reader what took
place before the story leads into the present action. The middle
carries the action forward, amid trouble and complications. In the
end, the conflict is resolved, and the story comes to a
satisfactory, but not necessarily a happy conclusion.
- It should be filled with characters whom real people admire and
envy. The plots must be filled with action. It should penetrate both
the heart and mind and shows man as he is, in all his misery and
glory.
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