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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
DRAMA
