1. Journal Activity:
RECORD the following entry in the table of contents of your classroom journal:
Date: 1/17
Title: Drama: Comedy and Tragedy
Pg. #: 12
DRAW , LABEL, and NUMBER the following chart:
3. LIST 3 funny movies/TV shows; LIST 3 serious (dramatic) movies/TV shows.
THINK about the characters and plots for each of the movies/TV shows you wrote down.
CHOOSE 1 item from the funny column and 1 item from the serious/dramatic column .
Below the chart, WRITE A sentence DESCRIPTION of each choice: What makes it funny? What makes it dramatic (serious)?
SHARE responses with BASELINE basketball partner.
Funny
Serious 1. 2. 3.

2. Drama: Forms and Stagecraft by Diane Tasca

3. Plays: Stories Acted Out
A play is a story acted out, live and onstage. A play presents characters performed by flesh and blood people in a physical setting, interacting before our eyes.
Like stories, plays consist of characters carrying out a series of actions, driven by a conflict.
Plays and stories differ markedly in their format.

4. Characteristics of a Story:
A prose narrative (uses sentences and paragraphs)
The narrator describes the characters, action, and settings
The character’s words are usually marked by quotation marks

5. Characteristics of a Play:
Consists entirely of the characters’ words and actions
Stage directions describe the characters’ actions, but are never heard by the audience

6. Dramatic Structure:
The plot of a play and story are similar in that they follow a rising and falling structure.
The plot is based on a conflict which can be internal or external; the element of conflict creates tension for the characters.
As the conflicts in a play grow more complicated, the tension increases.

7. Dramatic Structure:
The tension finally reaches a climax such as an argument, a chase, or a passionate love scene.
The conflict is resolved, the action winds down, and the play ends.

8. The March Toward Tragedy:
The oldest plays were performed in ancient Greece as part of religious festivals.
These festivals included tragedies and comedies.
The tragedies dealt with heroic characters and subjects that could not have been larger: fate, life and death.

9. A tragedy is the presentation of serious and important actions that end unhappily.
Some tragedies, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet portray innocent characters, but in most tragedies, the central character is a noble figure, known as the tragic hero, who has a personal failing that leads to his or her downfall.
This tragic flaw might be excessive pride, ambition, rebelliousness or passion – imperfections that lead the otherwise noble hero to make choices that doom him or her to a tragic end.

10. The Dance of Comedy: A comedy is a simple play that ends happily.
Many people would define a comedy as a funny play and in fact most comedies are meant to make us laugh.
But comedies can have other purposes such as making us think about issues and question things we take for granted.
The principle characters in a comedy can be from any class – princes, ordinary townspeople, servants.

11. Like tragic heroes, characters in comedies have flaws, however the flawed characters in a comedy usually discover the error of their ways and order is restored.
Like a tragedy, comedy is rooted in conflict; however, the conflict in comedies is usually romantic – someone wants to marry someone else but faces an obstacle.

12. In a comedy, the obstacle is always overcome, but not before complications – often ridiculous but sometimes serious - heighten the suspense.
The complications in a comedy can involve misunderstandings, mistaken identities, disguises and other transformations.

13. Modern Drama:
Today, there are no clear-cut distinctions between tragedy and comedy.
Many plays today mix the serious with the humorous.
Unlike most of the classic tragedies of ancient Greece and Shakespeare’s England, serious modern plays are not concerned with kings and queens; they tend to focus on the personal and domestic conflicts of ordinary people.
The characters in modern plays, both comedic and serious, will be someone the audience will identify with than look up to.

14. From Page to Stage: Dramas are meant to be performed.
It is the job of the actors, directors and set designers to translate the playwright’s intentions.
A wright (taken from the Old English word wyrhta – a worker or maker) is a person who constructs something. For example, a shipwright is a person who makes ships and a wheelwright is a person who makes wheels.
A playwright is a person who writes plays.

15. A stage can be grand or intimate in size.
It can be positioned in front of the audience, or it can be placed in the middle of the theater surrounded by the audience.
A stage is a small world unto itself with its own coordinates:
Upstage (away from the audience)
Downstage (toward the audience)
Stage right and stage left (the actor’s right and left when facing the audience)

16. Scene Design: Dressing the Stage
A set transforms a bare stage into a particular place and time.
A set may be realistic and detailed or it might be abstract or minimal, meeting the needs of the action with just a few movable boxes and screens.
A set can change from scene to scene using motorized lifts and turntables or a simple change of lighting.
Until the last few centuries most plays (including those of Shakespeare) were performed outdoors in natural light; today, most plays are performed indoors which require artificial lighting.

17. VHS One-Act: Witness for the Prosecution 2009

18. VHS One-Act: The Boy Next Door 2010

19. Actors dress in costumes appropriate for their characters as well as for the time and place of the play.
Costumes also suggest the social positions and professions of the characters.
Like sets, costumes can be elaborate or minimal.
Props (short for properties) are the portable items that actors carry or handle onstage.
All the elements of the scene design – sets, lights, costumes and props – work together to support the action and create the appropriate mood. Above all they help sustain the audience’s belief in the reality of the play.

20. Characters Onstage:
The conversation between characters in a play is called dialogue.
A long speech by one character to one or more other characters onstage is a monologue.
A speech by a character who is alone onstage, speaking to himself or herself or to the audience, is a soliloquy.
Playwrights often use monologues and soliloquies to develop ideas or express complex emotions.

21. Sometimes a character speaks to the audience or to another character in an aside, dialogue that is not supposed to be heard by the other characters onstage.
Texts of plays also include stage directions, which describe how the characters move around the stage and how they speak their lines. (When a play is published, the stage directions usually appear in italics.)

22. Actors, directors, and designers usually regard stage directions as suggestions rather than rigid specifications.
A playwright cannot specify every action every character performs. It is up to the actors to figure out how to fill out their characters’ lives physically and emotionally onstage.

23. With the director’s help, actors decide how to interpret the lines of a play by:
learning what the words mean
understanding why the character says them
discovering how the character feels while saying them (empathize)
Drama is one of the oldest forms of literature, but it continues to speak to people today.

24. Work Cited:
Tasca, Diane. “Drama: Forms and Stagecraft.” Elements of Literature: Third Course. Austin: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 2005, pg