A Comprehensive Glossary for Playwrights

We not too long ago ran a sensible toolkit for individuals who needed to be playwrights, and I needed to develop on what we will provide these seeking to get their voice into actors and onto the stage. At this time, I’ve a glossary for playwrights. It covers a number of phrases you could know if you wish to get into playwriting. So, for those who’re able to faucet your inside Shakespeare and put your phrases onto paper, be taught these things. Nothing like a bit of free schooling. Let’s dive in. A Glossary for PlaywrightsAbsurdism (Theatre of the Absurd): A method of theatre originating within the Fifties that emphasizes the meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence. Performs on this fashion typically characteristic illogical conditions, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue, and unconventional constructions.Act: A serious division in a play. Acts are sometimes divided into smaller sections referred to as scenes.Motion: The bodily and psychological occasions of the story. What a personality does to attain their goal.Adaptation: The method of changing a piece from one other medium (like a novel, movie, or historic occasion) right into a play.Antagonist: The character or power that opposes the protagonist, creating the central battle of the play.Apron: The world of the stage that extends in entrance of the proscenium arch.Archetype: A universally acknowledged character sort, image, or state of affairs (e.g., the hero, the mentor, the trickster).Area Stage (or Theatre within the Spherical): A stage setup the place the viewers surrounds the performing space on all sides.Apart: A short remark made by a personality on to the viewers, which is known to be inaudible to the opposite characters on stage.Beat: The smallest unit of motion in a scene. A beat shift happens when a personality adjustments goal or tactic. It could additionally check with a deliberate pause in dialogue, typically famous within the script.Black Field Theatre: A versatile efficiency area, usually a big sq. room with black partitions and a flat ground, that may be configured into varied stage/viewers preparations.Black Comedy (or Darkish Comedy): A subgenre of comedy that offers with taboo or severe topics, similar to loss of life, illness, or conflict, in a satirical or humorous method.Blackout: A sudden and full darkening of the stage, typically used to finish a scene.Blocking: The exact staging of actors’ actions on stage. A playwright could counsel key actions in stage instructions.Catharsis: The emotional launch or purification skilled by the viewers on the finish of a tragedy.Character Arc: The transformation or inside journey of a personality over the course of the story.Chekhov’s Gun: A dramatic precept stating that each ingredient in a narrative have to be needed, and irrelevant parts needs to be eliminated. If a gun is launched within the first act, it should go off by the top.Climax: The purpose of biggest rigidity or turning level within the play, the place the central battle involves a head.Comedy: A style of play that’s humorous and usually has a cheerful ending for the primary characters.Fee: A charge paid to a playwright to put in writing a particular play for a theatre firm or producer.Battle: The central wrestle between opposing forces. May be inside (character vs. self) or exterior (character vs. character, society, or nature).Crossfade: A lighting or sound impact the place one ingredient easily fades out whereas one other fades in.Cue: A sign, both verbal or bodily, that signifies one thing else is to occur (e.g., a line of dialogue that triggers one other actor’s entrance, a light-weight change).Cyclorama (Cyc): A big curtain or wall, typically curved, positioned behind the stage and used for lighting results or projections.Denouement (or Decision): The ultimate a part of the play the place the strands of the plot are drawn collectively, and the central battle is resolved.Deus Ex Machina: Latin for “god from the machine.” A plot system whereby a seemingly unsolvable downside is immediately resolved by an surprising and unlikely intervention.Dialogue: The dialog between two or extra characters.Diction: The selection and use of phrases and phrases in speech or writing.Direct Tackle: When a personality speaks on to the viewers, acknowledging their presence.Downstage: The world of the stage closest to the viewers.Dramatic Irony: A tool the place the viewers’s understanding of occasions surpasses that of the characters.Dramatis Personae: The listing of characters in a play, normally discovered at the start of the script.Dramaturg: A literary advisor who works with the playwright, director, and inventive crew to assist form the play by means of analysis, suggestions, and script evaluation.Epic Theatre: A theatrical motion related to Bertolt Brecht that seeks to attraction to the viewers’s mind moderately than their feelings, typically utilizing strategies to remind them they’re watching a play.Exposition: The introductory a part of a play that gives needed background data.Expressionism: A method of theatre that presents the world from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional impact in an effort to evoke moods or concepts.Falling Motion: The part of the play that follows the climax, the place rigidity decreases and the story strikes towards its conclusion.Farce: A comedy that goals to entertain by means of exaggerated, inconceivable conditions, slapstick, and broad bodily humor.Flashback: A scene set in a time sooner than the primary story.Flat Character: A two-dimensional character who just isn’t well-developed and doesn’t change all through the play.Foil: A personality who contrasts with one other character (normally the protagonist) to spotlight specific qualities.Foreshadowing: A touch of what’s to return later within the story.Fourth Wall: The imaginary “wall” on the entrance of the stage separating the viewers from the world of the play.French Scene: A scene division marked by the doorway or exit of a personality.Freytag’s Pyramid: A mannequin of dramatic construction that maps a play’s motion as: exposition, rising motion, climax, falling motion, and denouement.Gobo: A skinny piece of metallic or glass used to switch the form of the sunshine from a lighting instrument.Hamartia: The deadly flaw resulting in the downfall of a tragic hero.Home: The world of the theatre the place the viewers sits.Hubris: Extreme pleasure or self-confidence, typically the tragic flaw of a protagonist.Inciting Incident: The occasion that units the primary battle in movement.In Medias Res: Latin for “in the course of issues.” A story that begins within the midst of the plot.Melodrama: A dramatic work with exaggerated characters and thrilling occasions supposed to attraction to the feelings.Monologue: A protracted speech by one character, delivered to different characters on stage.Musical Theatre: A type of theatre that mixes songs, spoken dialogue, performing, and dance.Naturalism: A heightened type of realism that seeks to current a “slice of life” on stage, typically specializing in how setting and heredity form characters.Goal: What a personality needs or wants in a selected scene.Impediment: One thing that stands in the way in which of a personality attaining their goal.Offstage (O.S.): Signifies dialogue, sound, or motion that happens out of the viewers’s view.One-Act Play: A play that takes place in a single act.Parenthetical: A short be aware in parentheses inside dialogue that describes a personality’s tone, motion, or intention (e.g., angrily, to herself). Use sparingly.Pinter Pause: A sort of pause in dialogue, named after playwright Harold Pinter, that’s stuffed with unstated subtext and rigidity.Plot: The sequence of occasions that make up the story of the play.Props (Properties): Objects used on stage by actors.Proscenium Stage: The most typical sort of stage, framed by an arch that creates a “image body” impact.Protagonist: The primary character of the play.Rake: A stage that’s sloped, with the upstage finish larger than the downstage finish.Studying: A efficiency the place actors learn from the script, with minimal staging, for an invited viewers to assist the playwright hear the play aloud.Realism: A method of theatre that goals to create the phantasm of actual life on stage.Decision (or Denouement): The ultimate consequence of the story.Reversal (Peripeteia): A sudden and surprising change in fortune or circumstances for the protagonist.Rising Motion: The sequence of occasions that construct from the inciting incident towards the climax.Spherical Character: A posh, well-developed character with depth and dimension.Royalties: The charge paid to a playwright for every public efficiency of their play.Satire: A style that makes use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to reveal and criticize individuals’s stupidity or vices.Scene: A division of an act, normally representing a steady motion in a particular time and place.Scrim: A chunk of gauze-like cloth that seems opaque when lit from the entrance and clear when lit from behind.Setting: The time and place the place the motion happens.Soliloquy: A speech wherein a personality, normally alone on stage, speaks their ideas aloud on to the viewers.Stage Instructions: The playwright’s notes describing the setting, characters’ actions, and visible results.Stage Left / Stage Proper: The perimeters of the stage from the actor’s perspective as they face the viewers.Stakes: What a personality stands to achieve or lose. Excessive stakes create excessive rigidity.Static Character: A personality who doesn’t bear any important change through the play.Stichomythia: Speedy, alternating single strains of dialogue between two characters, typically utilized in scenes of intense battle or emotion.Inventory Character: A stereotypical character simply acknowledged by the viewers (e.g., the nagging spouse, the clever previous man).Subplot: A secondary storyline that coexists with the primary plot.Subtext: The unstated ideas, emotions, and motivations that lie beneath the floor of the dialogue.Suspension of Disbelief: The viewers’s willingness to simply accept the fictional world of the play.Tableau: A silent and immobile depiction of a scene, typically used on the finish of an act.Tactic: The particular technique a personality makes use of to attain their goal.Ten-Minute Play: A brief play that runs for roughly ten minutes.Theme: The central thought or underlying message of the play.Thrust Stage: A stage that extends into the viewers on three sides.Tragedy: A style of drama primarily based on human struggling that invokes catharsis within the viewers. The protagonist normally has a tragic flaw and meets a disastrous finish.Tragicomedy: A style that blends points of each tragedy and comedy.Upstage: The world of the stage furthest from the viewers.Verisimilitude: The looks of being true or actual.Voice-Over (V.O.): Dialogue spoken by an unseen character, typically used for narration.Wings: The offstage areas to the proper and left of the performing space.Workshop: A collaborative course of the place a play is developed with actors, a director, and a dramaturg, typically resulting in a staged studying or a full manufacturing.Let me know what I ought to add within the feedback.