Overview of Structure-Theatre Basics PDF

Title Overview of Structure-Theatre Basics
Author Justin Lee
Course History of Drama & Theater II
Institution Emory University
Pages 7
File Size 163.1 KB
File Type PDF
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Summary

Theatre overview on structure, how theatre is structualized...


Description

OVERVIEW OF STRUCTURE Terms Beyond the structuring of the plot, a play may also be seen to be structured in a larger sense. Some aspects of this larger structuring include: Dramatic Structure. Fundamental elements of dramatic structure include: Scene Linkage: Action Sequences and Interruptions (Subplots, Counter-Threads, Temporal Shifts). A fundamental strategy of dramatic composition is the ability to link one scene to another. What makes this scene follow that? If the play has a single story, and it is revealed in chronological order, then one scene is likely to lead us to expect the next logical event, to be fulfilled, we suppose, in the next scene. A sequence of scenes that follow directly, one on the other, unified by a consistent central character or story, we might call an Action Sequence. The simplest kind of dramatic action would simply maintain a single action sequence. But the more complex and involved structures create alternatives--having set up an action with its own momentum and drive, each scene will establish an expectation for what is to come next, and then we get to ask: does the following scene fulfill that expectation, or are we diverted onto the tale of minor characters, or distracted by a new setting, or set back by a choral commentary on the action, or what? Interruptions in and diversions from the basic Action Sequence are illuminating-they have much to do with the kind of play we are engaged with: Western neoclassical drama, such as that of Molière, is governed by structural rules, and feature a single story and mercilessly tight linkage of scenes; however, Brechtian “epic” playwriting often depends on a much looser connection between scenes, so that the audience can sit back more coolly and look for patterns of behavior and theme rather than leaning in to follow the tightly constructed suspense of plot. Importantly, while cultivated traditions like the French neoclassical tragedy or the Japanese Noh drama pride themselves on tight, focused, and consistent structures, popular dramatic forms, both Eastern and Western, tend to include contrasting stories or other continuities within a single play. So the principal plot may alternate with another, secondary story (a subplot), or be interrupted by recurring comic characters or commentators on the action who don’t so much add another story as another recurring point of view and tone (a counter-thread), or the forward action of the play may be interrupted by a flashback or a sudden leap into the future (a temporal shift), or even a shift into an alternate, fantastical reality. Thus, much dramatic construction has to do with the arrangement of a principal plot, as a coherent action sequence, with contrasting subplots or other threads or lines of action or entertainment.

Arrangement of principal plot with subplots, counter-threads, etc. From the ancient Roman playwright Terence on, Western drama in particular has delighted in combining separate plots into a single play, and a playwright thus engaged must not only build logic, exposition, coherence, foreshadowing, climax, and conclusion for each plot-stand, but must weave these separate coherences together into a satisfying overall sequence that builds, crests, and concludes together in a calculated combinatory whole. It can be worthwhile to consider each strand separately, but the overall construction must be observed as part of understanding the play. It is also true that, while subplots, counter-threads, and the like need provide nothing more than diversion and variety, they can also be used by the playwright, not only to vary the entertainment, but also to expand its ideas—if the main and subsidiary plots are both love stories, or tales of rescue, or conquest tales, the contrasts between their moods and tones and points of view can open up the world of the play to conflicting ideas on its main themes. Thus, the main plot and its diversions may be structured deliberately to contrast with each other; there can be considerable craft for the playwright in building an overall audience experience by alternating the heroic main plot with the subplot of the comic sidekicks or the doomed secondary romance or the cynical friend of the family who offers worldly commentary, artfully redirecting the audience’s point of view from scene to scene. Dramatic Rhythm. Rhythm of acts. Western drama began, from the example of the ancient Roman tragedy writer Seneca, with a dictate of a five-act structure shaping the principal action of the play; this changed, in the Spanish Golden Age and in nineteenth-century popular drama, into a loosely-held standard of a three-act pattern; today, two acts or one dominate. But the five-act form implicitly underlies all, laying out the underlying, or implicit pattern beneath any conventional one-act, two-act, or three-act structure: according to the Senecan, neoclassical tradition, the first act of a full-length play would encompass the initial exposition and the eruption from the exposition recovering the past story events into the present action (signaled by the “driving choice”); the task of the implicit second act would be to push the action toward the climax (“rising action”); the implicit third act would express the climax or the central reversal; the implicit fourth act, the “falling action” that registers the climax’s impact; and the fifth act, the conclusion or--to use the term that became the standard term for centuries, the "catastrophe" (cf. the German critic and playwright Gustav Freytag). Expressly or implicitly, playwrights often mark these stages in the construction of the play, whether the formal five act divisions are held to or not. Each act (whether explicit or implicit) or each stage in the overall plot, is expected to conclude with a strong, dramatically emphatic event or crystallization of the action that encapsulates the progress of the story to this point and drives the suspense toward the next stage. (In the nineteenth century in the West, the playwright would go so far as to prescribe a “tableau” at the end of each act, an elaborate stage picture, growing out of the dialogue, that encapsulated the dramatic situation in striking visual terms just before the act-

curtain came down.) Thus, in any play, it is sensible to look through the dramatic action for these crystallizing moments that clarify and make memorable the current state of the story: the driving choice, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the conclusion all might be theatrically marked. (See “action-images,” below.) Rhythm of scenes and beats. Scenes. Each act of a play is formally or informally divided into scenes, which in turn are informally divided into sub-scenes or “beats.” A scene can be a formally laid-out section of the play, indicating a different time or place, a different set of characters, a different time, formally numbered and laid out on the page as "Scene 3," or whatever. Or it can simply be a discernible section of the ongoing action that has its own dramatic shape, its own sense of beginning, middle, and end. Like the acts of a play, whether scenes are formally divided--numbered, titled, separated--or not, they are best realized when they have an emphatic plot reversal, and a striking conclusion (or "button") that sums up the action to that point while pointing to the future. "French scenes." This is an odd historical misstep that yielded a useful term: in the French neoclassical theater, every new combination of actors on the stage was enumerated as a “scene,” without any indication of a curtain falling or other cessation of action or change of locale: this was a kind of formatting procedure for the printing of the script that aided the organization of rehearsals. These have come to be known as “French scenes”—but, as a new French scene in this sense occurs every time any character exits or enters, it need not be taken as a division of the ongoing dramatic action in our normal sense of a “scene” as such--it's simply a different arrangement of bodies onstage. But it is often a sign of a change in what's going on, an implicit change division of the action of the play. Again, we would ideally look for a clear reversal and a clearly-staged conclusion. Beats. To many analysts, the fundamental building-block of Western drama, particularly from the early modern period on, is the “beat”—this is thought to be the director and acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski’s Russian mispronunciation of “bit,” meaning a piece or small segment of a scene, but, even if it is based on a pronunciation error, the term also benefits from its evocation of musical rhythm, as the succession of beats form the ongoing rhythm of a scene or act of a play. A beat in this sense means the execution of a character’s small but defined intention to a point of success or failure, with related beats adding up to create a more substantial scene: beats make up a scene. For example, in a single scene in Act Two of Hedda Gabler, Hedda gets Eilert Løvborg, a reformed alcoholic, to drink, and the reversal from Løvborg refusing liquor to drinking is a major plot event, a realization of Hedda's intention. However, getting Løvborg to drink is not simple; Hedda must try three distinct tactics to persuade him, and it isn't until the tird effort that she realizes her intention: the first (“If I ask you?”) fails--that attempt and failure is one beat; the second (warning him that the other men think he’s weak for not drinking) fails--an attempt and failure makes a second beat; the third (informing him that his beloved Thea had no faith in his abstinence) works and Løvborg takes the drink. So the scene, with its central reversal (Hedda gets Løvborg to drink) is accomplished in three beats (a failed effort, a failed effort, a success).

So a beat’s elements are (1) a character’s intention (or objective), (2) an obstacle or counter-force that opposes that intention (usually from another character’s opposition), (3) a tactic or tactics, that is, a specific action by which the goal is pursued, and (4) victory or failure (i.e., the situation changes or doesn’t change). So each beat contains a small, distinct reversal/climax, a turn that decides whether the dramatic situation changes or remains the same. Many directors take pains to define each beat with a clarifying staging, including a crystallizing final moment or “button” that gives finality to each beat. Caveat: Not everything is a “scene” (or “beat”) in this sense. However, this objective/obstacle/tactic/reversal mode of analysis, particularly apt in understanding popular playwriting from the mid-nineteenth century on, and supported by Stanislavski’s influential counsel for actors and directors, ignores, or relegates to a level of playwright’s error, any passages that don’t fit this model. Yet, from the beginning of Western playwriting, there have been passages and elements in plays that evade it: Aristotle in the Poetics speaks of scenes of pathos, that is, passages of pure emotional expression for its own sake; the Athenian tragedy Aristotle is remembering also featured choral odes that may serve any number of functions that could only forcibly be framed as objective-driven behavior—they are more likely to be reflective. Soliloquies, lyrical passages, clowning bits, thematic speeches, passages of song or dance, ritual scenes, and the like all provide alternative theatrical energies that evade the limited strictures of character objectives. So not everything is a "beat," a unit of driven characters pursuing their intentions to victory or failure. To acknowledge beats, scenes, and acts, is to acknowledge that changes in the plot— reversals or action-events—happen at a variety of levels of significance: a series of beats may make up a scene, each with their own levels of plot reversal, and these add up to acts, and acts add up to a play with a single, overall, fundamental plot reversal. Theatrical Rhythm. Changes in theatrical texture. It is important to notice the changes in the texture of the play text, the changes in its language and its indications for performance—the shift from dialogue to soliloquy, from prose to verse and back again, the changes in verse form within a scene, changes from one language or diction (say, high-flown rhetoric) to another (say, comic dialect or slang), the interposition of song or dumbshow or stage violence into the normal dialogue of the play, or the presence of prologues, choruses, or other conventional features of language. These changes form a pattern, and it is valuable to see which dramatic elements are associated with which kind of language, and how the playwright uses changes in dramatic texture to highlight and emphasize certain ideas and tones and theatrical pleasures. Verbal Rhythm When reading dramatic dialogue, the written language on a page needs to be heard by the imagining ear. This is a sensitivity to develop throughout the term. One of the clues that helps the most is to look at visible changes on the page: when dialogue is set in

verse (a period of short lines that don't extend to the right margin) and suddenly changes to prose (filling out the page from one margin to the next), that is an important change of tone; when the form of verse changes, that matters, too. When a character's speech is typologically indicated to be different: SHOUTING INDICATED IN CAPITALS, or intense emphasis in italics or a lot of . . . hesitation . . .indicated by . . . ellipses, these are notable idications that something different is happening in the sound and feel of the dialogue. It can indicate many kinds of difference in the play, and can isolate high points. One of the signal challenges of reading and analyzing dramatic literature lies in conceiving the play as not only a verbal composition, but a conscious composition of theatrical effects, including effects of sound, sight, and bodily movement and presence. Although the division of theatrical (performative) rhythm from dramatic (verbal, literary) rhythm is arbitrary, and ultimately the best playwriting links the two, it can still be valuable to call on the visual and aural and kinesthetic imagination to conceive the play as a crafted series of sensual/theatrical effects, in order to heighten our awareness of the play’s impact and the playwright’s artfulness. The play must be experienced and understood sensually as well as logically. Visual rhythm. A mapping of the visual rhythm of a play would look for changes—contrasts—in the visual aspects of the play (a change from a plain to a highly elaborate setting, from small space to large, from colorless to colorful, from crowded to empty, a heroine changes from plain-Jane spinster clothes into a Kabuki robe, the lights take us from afternoon through sunset and into darkness, the Duke enters flanked on either side by his silent attendants in livery, enlarging his presence and power, etc.), and, within those contrasts, for highlights of visual pleasure and impact. These should be understood as a deliberate pattern, a pattern of emphasis, tone, and sensual stimulation—and, if possible, connected to the meanings and the plot progression of the play. Action-images. An action-image—another term coined for this course—is a moment of crucial physical action seen on the stage, a particular action of the highest significance for the play: Richard II takes off his crown and hands it to his usurper Bolingbroke; Count Almaviva promises, then refuses to place the wedding veil on the head of the servant girl he has sexual designs on; King Lear tears the map of England, prefiguring civil war; the goddess Athena leads the Furies in a dance that changes them into kindly beings; the repentant alcoholic Eilert Løvborg takes the alcoholic beverage from Hedda and drinks. A theatrical reading of a play must take great care to perceive and to imagine action-images for the crucial moments of the play. Kinesthetic moments. Kinesthesia is sensuous empathy: when someone near us gets hit, we flinch; when we watch someone eat greedily, our mouths may water; when a man or woman is kissed onstage, we may instinctively hold our breaths as if we ourselves were kissing. Our bodies respond empathetically to the experiences of those we watch. In analyzing the

theatrical effect of a play, then, we should make note of all occasions when the performance offers us a chance to feel in our imaginations what the bodies of the actors onstage are feeling—moments of intense physical experience for the actors’ bodies that we feel with them. A slap, a kiss, vivid drunkenness, a big hug, shivering from cold, luxurious eating—any opportunity to feel what an actor’s body is depicting. (There is obviously an overlap here between kinesthetic empathy and emotional empathy—an actor may swoon, or break down in body-wracking sobs, or stab a knife into a table in frustrated fury, or fall about laughing, and we in the audience, attuned to the character’s feelings, may feel the onrush of these feelings especially keenly, intensified by a sympathetic physical response to the emotional expression--even in these cases of emotional sympathy, the avenue by which we are moved is through bodily sensation, not an abstract emotional idea.) Sonic rhythm. Easily ignored or forgotten in our reading, we should pay special attention to the sounds of the plays we read—the sounds of trumpets announcing royalty, shouting, offstage crowd noises, underlying music, the crash of a dropped plate, the tramping feet of a crowd of actors exiting or entering, the clink of teacups and spoons, of forks against plates, birdsong, rushing water, traffic noise: all of these form the sonic material of the play, and the changes (contrasts) and crises (highlights) of sounds should again be understood as part of a deliberate pattern, a pattern of emphasis, tone, and sensory excitement, hopefully one that can be connected to the meanings and the plot of the play. Questions to Ask About the Structure of a Play 1. How are scenes linked in this play? Is the feel of the play tightly focused, suspenseful, consistent, obsessive, or loose, wandering, varied, inclusive, casual? Does it feel like a small, contained world or an expansive one? Does every action have ripple effect, causes propelling inevitable effects, or is this a world where events can be random or inconsequential? 2. Define the principal plot and the subplots or counter-threads or temporal shifts of the play. How do the different strains of the play differ from each other? What unites them? 3. How does the language change between the various strains of the play? What are their contrasting tones and moods? 4. What is theatrically associated with each strain of the play—which characters, scenery, events, activities typically define each? 5. Note the turning-points in the structure of the play, especially in the principal plot (N.B.: remember the fundamental five-act pattern): where exactly is the turn from initial exposition to present-tense action, where is the driving choice, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the conclusion? Are there specific striking moments in the writing that mark these points? Are there vivid action-images prescribed or possible at these points? You may do the same for the various sub-plots. 6. Note visual and sonic changes, the contrasts and high points (esp. actionimages) throughout the play.

7. Note moments that invite kinesthetic responses from the audience. Exercises that May Be Useful Make a graphic sketch of the feel of the progressing action of the play, marking the interweaving of plot and subplot and marking major turning points. Does it feel like a branching tree? A circle that repeats? A pendular swing back and forth between opposite realities? Go through the play and mark all implicit and explicit stage directions. List: all described scenery (remembering that most period of theater, east and west, do not involve realistic scenery and elaborate scene changes—list only what the playwright requires), props, costumes and costume changes, sound effects, and lighting changes. Create an action chart for the play: for all the successive scenes of the play, mark the plot events, separate plot from subplot and counter-tracks, etc., note theatrical changes. A format for action charts will be offered in a sepa...


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