Drama Terms

Question 1

Exposition

Answer 1

The opening portion of a narrative or drama in which the scene is set, the protagonist is introduced, and the author discloses any other background information necessary for the audience to understand the events that are to follow.

Question 2

Double Plot

Answer 2

(Also called subplot) A secondary story or plot line that is complete and interesting in its own right, often doubling (mirroring) or inverting the main plot

Question 3

Conflict

Answer 3

The central struggle between two or more forces. Conflict generally occurs when some person or thing prevents the protagonist from achieving his or her goal

Question 4

Climax

Answer 4

The moment of greatest intensity, which almost inevitably occurs toward the end of the work. The clima often takes the form of a decisive confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist

Question 5

Resolution

Answer 5

The final part of a narrative, the concluding action or actions that follow the climax

Question 6

Unities

Answer 6

Unity of time, place, and action, the three formal qualities recommended by Renaissance critics to give a theatrical plot cohesion and integrity. According to this theory, a play should depict the causes and effects of a single action unfolding in one day in one place

Question 7

Aside

Answer 7

A speech that a character addresses directly to the audience, understood to be unheard by the other characters on stage, as when the villain in a melodrama chortles “Heh! Heh! Now she’s in my power!”

Question 8

Stage business

Answer 8

Nonverbal action that engages the attention of an audience

Question 9

Tragedy

Answer 9

A play that portrays a serious conflict between human beings and some superior overwhelming force. It ends sorrowfully and disastrously, an outcome that seems inevitable

Question 10

Comedy

Answer 10

A literary work aimed at amusing an audience. In Traditional comedy, the protagonist often faces obstacles and complications that threaten disaster but are overturned at the last moment to produce a happy ending

Question 11

Deus ex machina

Answer 11

Latin for “god out of the machine.” Originally the phrase referred to the Greek playwrights’ frequent use of a god, mechanically lowered to the stage from a skene roof to resolve the human conflict. Today, deus ex machina refers to any forced or improbable device used to resolve a plot

Question 12

Masks

Answer 12

In Latin, the word for masks is personae. In classical Greek theater, masks covered an actor’s entire head. Large, recognizable masks allowed far-away spectators to distinguish the conventional characters of tragedy and comedy

Question 13

Hamartia

Answer 13

Greek for “error”. An offense committed in ignorance of some material fact a great mistake made as a result of an error in judgment by a morally good person

Question 14

Tragic flaw

Answer 14

A fatal weakness or a moral flaw in the protagonist that brings him or her to a bad end. Sometimes offered as an alternative understanding of hamartia, in contrast to the idea that the tragic hero’s catastrophe is caused by an error in judgment

Question 15

Hubris

Answer 15

Overweening pride, outrageous behavior, or the insolence that leads to ruin, the antithesis of moderation or rectitude (moral integrity). Hubris is a type of tragic flaw

Question 16

Peripeteia

Answer 16

Greek for “sudden change” often Anglicized as peripety. A reversal of fortune, a sudden change of circumstance affecting the protagonist. According to Aristotle, the play’s peripety occurs when a certain result is expected and instead its opposite effect is produced. In a tragedy, the reversal takes the protagonist from good fortune to catastrophe

Question 17

Recognition

Answer 17

A realization. In tragic plotting, the moment of recognition occurs when ignorance gives way to knowledge, illusion to disillusion

Question 18

Katharsis, Catharsis

Answer 18

Often translated from Greek as purgation or purification. It is the feeling of emotional release or calm that the spectator feels at the end of a tragedy. The term is drawn from Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, relating to the final cause or purpose of tragic art. Some feel that through katharsis, drama taught the audience compassion for the vulnerabilities of others and schooled it in justice and other civic virtues

Question 19

Realism

Answer 19

An attempt to reproduce faithfully on the stage to the surface appearance of life, especially that of ordinary people in everyday situations. In a historical sense, Realism refers to a movement in the nineteenth-century European theater. Realist drama customarily focused on the middle class (and occasionally the working class) rather than the aristocracy

Question 20

Naturalism

Answer 20

A type of drama in which the characters are presented as products or victims of environment and heredity. Naturalism, considered an extreme form of Realism, customarily depicts the social, psychological, and economic milieu (environment, figurative landscape) of the primary characters

Question 21

Symbolist drama

Answer 21

A style of drama that avoids direct statement and exposition, instead favoring owerful evocation and suggestion. In place of realistic stage settings and actions. Symbolist drama uses lighting, music, and dialogue to create a mystical atmosphere

Question 22

Expressionism

Answer 22

A dramatic style developed between 1910 and 1924 in Germany in reaction against Realism’s focus on the surface details and external reality. Expressionist style used episodic plots, distorted lines, exaggerated shapes, abnormally intense coloring, mechanical physical movement, and telegraphic speech to create a dreamlike subjective realm

Question 23

Theater of the absurd

Answer 23

Postwar European genre depicting the grotesquely comic plight of human beings thrown by accident into an irrational and meaningless world. The critic Martin Esslin coined the term to characterize plays by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Eugéne lonesco