Goals

• Playwright is primary artist but requires interpretive artists
• communicate a plot, characters, themes, heightened language to an audience
• work within genre restrictions
• develop a personal style

• Use action, dialogue, sometimes description
• Language
• dialogue
• verse or prose, naturalistic or heightened
• diction key to each character, also place and time
• Imagination
• shape plot
• develop character conflicts
• select and develop thematic material
• reshape personal experience

• Many drafts, especially once in production

• story vs. plot
• exposition
• inciting incident
• rising action/complication
• climax
• falling action/denouement
• many action cycles within a play and within scenes
• conflict
• climax
• resolution
• Freytag's triangle plots suspense over time

• plot starts late in story
• single action, no subplots
• small number of characters
• one or few locations

• Episodic plots of 20th century an extreme
• subplots, several parallel actions
• large number of characters and locations
• themes thoroughly explored over multiple characters and actions

• in drama and tragedy, well defined and like us so we identify with them and their conflicts
• in comedy, characters are laughable, we should not identify too closely, so characters are more two dimensional
• stock characters

• protagonist/leading man or lady
• antagonist/heavy
• confidant/confidante (if female)
• ingenue (female) or juvenile -- young lovers
• servant characters: parasite, soubrette (female)
• grand dame (think musicals like Hello Dolly, Mame)
• old man or woman -- either as fool or wisdom figure
• foil to protagonist
• clown and straight man

• today, lives off royalties -- and often teaching or another trade
• Ancient Greece: not a profession but a hobby exercised for civic and religious duty. Full year to write and rehearse 5 plays if selected.
• Renaissance:  most authors nobility, some professional theatre people with flair for language (Shakespeare). Plays are property of the company who commissions or buys it, unless it is published.
• 17th century: playwright can publish a play for extra cash, writer earns profits from third night benefits. Women emerge as writers.
• 19th century: star system, introduction of copyrights
• Early 20th century: International copyright laws, unions emerge:
• Dramatists Guild
• Screenwriters Guild

• Aristotle defines tragedy and comedy, c. 335 BC
• Tragedy
• single plot, starts near climax
• characters of magnitude (kings, heros, gods)
• high diction/verse
• end unhappily, typically in death
• goal is "catharsis"
• 17th century: challenge that characters should be above us
• 19th century: lose verse for heightened prose
• Comedy: many subgenres, but elements in common
• characters like us: middle or lower class with flaws
• everyday language/prose
• end happily
• goal is to "teach and please" -- criticize our personal and social flaws with the goal of correcting them
• Comedy of manners -- high comedy
• pokes fun of, criticizes excesses of "in" crowd
• witty language, linguistic cleverness
• characters two dimensional
• Comedy of character
• Situation comedy
• Domestic comedy
• Satire -- makes fun of current trends, politics, dress, speech, music
• Farce -- low comedy
• earliest extant Greek "Old Comedies" are farcical
• sight gags
• language from gutter acceptable
• cartoonish, absurdity
• characters one dimensional
• Melodrama
• characters predictable, "good guy" and "bad guy"
• plots involved but predictable, "poetic justice" outcomes
• moral/thematic material very clear and conventional
• plots selected for maximum spectacle
• Tragicomedy or drama
• Elements of tragedy and comedy in one play
• typically well defined characters
• typically developed, serious themes
• some characters or events used for comic ends
• could end happily or unhappily -- suspense...