1. Drama
--A literary composition involving conflict, action, crisis, and atmosphere designed to be acted by players on a stage before an audience. This definition applies to motion pictures as well as to traditional stage.

2. Drama is the most dependent of art forms.
Directors, actors, and scene and costume designers must interpret before the audience does

3. The Place Of An Actor
He must respect his play, his part, his fellow players, and his audience.
He should have enough imagination to create character for us instead of merely exploiting his own personality.
He should use his voice, facial expression, bodily poise, and gestures that enable him to project the character as he conceives it.

4. Types of Drama Tragedy— a serious play having an unhappy ending
It often involved death or destruction of a noble person through a flaw in his character
Modern tragedy often shows the tragedy of the weak and the mean rather than the strong and the noble.

5. Types of Drama
Comedy
A lighter drama in which the leading characters overcome the difficulties that temporarily beset them.
Includes a happy ending

6. Types of Drama History Play (Chronicle Play)
based on recorded history rather than on myth or legend
In England, early plays were like pageants, yet they included battle scenes.

7. Dramatic Terms
Aside—lines whispered to the audience or to another character on stage
Catastrophe—a final event in a drama (a death in a tragedy or a marriage in a comedy)
Comic Relief—a bit of humor injected into a serious play to relieve the heavy tension of tragic events

8. Dramatic Terms
Dramatic Irony—occurs when the audience knows something that the character does not
Poetic Justice—the operation of justice in a play with fair distribution of rewards for good deeds and punishment for wrong doing

9. Dramatic Terms
Monologue—an actor delivers a speech in the presence of other characters who listen, but do not speak
Tragic Flaw—a character trait that leads one to his/her own downfall or destruction
Tragic Hero--an honorable protagonist with a tragic flaw, also known as fatal flaw, which eventually leads to his demise

10. Dramatic Terms Soliloquy
a single character on stage expresses thoughts and feelings out loud.
used extensively during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in England
allows a dramatist to convey important information about a character