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
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 agreedupon ways to communicate information and experience
to audiences.
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
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. . . .
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”)
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
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
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
Writing Strategies: Plot
• Resolutions and endings:
– Restores balance to world of play
– Satisfies audiences expectations
– In absurdist plays, represented in completion of cycle
Writing Strategies: Plot
• Simultaneous plots:
– Two stories told concurrently
– Used to represent life’s variety and complexity
– Secondary plot (subplot) resolved before main plot
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.
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.”
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).
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
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.