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| The person in charge of practical matters connected with a stage production, such as securing finances, arranging for theater use, furnishing materials, renting or making costumes and properties, guaranteeing payments, and so on. |
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| A stage in which a proscenium arch separates the audience from the acting area; the effect is to produce a "room" with one wall missing. |
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| A modern theater arrangement, often outdoors, in which the audience totally surrounds the stage, with all actors entering and exiting along the aisles. Also called an arena stage. |
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| A stage that projects outward into the spectator area, thus increasing the area for action. A characteristic feature of Elizabethan stages and many recent ones. |
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| Originating in classical Greece, a theater designed with a stage surrounded by tiers of seats arranged in a semicircle |
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| A drama in which the main characters suffer a catastrophic end for the purpose of arousing pity on the part of the audience. Often involves the downfall of a person of great significance. |
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| Drama featuring a happy ending, designed to amuse the audience. |
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| A type of comedy whose likable and sensible main characters are placed in difficulties from which they are rescued at the end of the play, either attaining their ends or having their good fortunes restored. |
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| A type of twentieth-century drama rooted in existentialism, portraying humans as isolated creatures living a meaningless existence. Such plays dismiss conventional plot, setting, and characterization. |
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| Drama that attempts, in content and in presentation, to preserve the illusion of actual, everyday life. |
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| Drama that in content, presentation, or both, departs markedly from fidelity to the outward appearances of life. |
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| A popular form of theater that features stereotyped characters, such as villains, heroes, and young lovers, engaged in sensational events, intrigue, and action. This presents suspenseful plots centered on exaggerated conflicts between good and evil. The term is often employed pejoratively to connote a lack of psychological depth and an excess of emotional excitement. |
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| A kind of literature that ridicules human folly with the purpose of bringing about reform or of keeping others from falling into similar folly or vice. |
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| A play that includes the boisterous and even crude types of action that happen when characters indulge in horseplay and sexual humor. Characters usually speak in colloquial terms and may even knock one another about and tumble down with and upon one another. |
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| Any dramatic device which, though it departs from reality, is implicitly accepted by author and audience as a means of representing reality. |
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| A speech in which a character, alone on the stage, addresses himself or herself; a "thinking out loud," a dramatic means of letting an audience know character's thoughts and feelings. |
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| A brief speech in which a character turns from the person being addressed to speak directly to the audience; a dramatic device for letting the audience know what a character is really thinking or feeling as opposed to what the character pretends to think or feel. |
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| In a tragedy, a comic scene that follows a scene of seriousness and by contrast intensifies the emotions aroused by the serious scene. |
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| In classical Greek drama, a group of actors set apart from the main action of the play, who comment regularly on the implications of the action. The chorus often wore masks and performed ritualized dance movements as they chanted. |
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| According to Aristotle, the purging of emotions at the end of a tragedy. During the play, audiences experience pity and fear as they identify with the tragic hero; a successful tragedy ends by reaffirming traditional human values, allowing the audience to experience this effect. |
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| In Greek tragedy, a criminal act committed in ignorance of some material fact or even for the sake of a greater good. |
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| The stage of dramatic or narrative structure which introduces all things necessary for the development of the plot. |
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| Another term for the introduction of the play. |
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| A stage of narrative and dramatic structure in which the major conflicts are brought out. |
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| Another term for the development of the play that precedes and leads up to the climax |
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| The point of uncertainty and tension - the turning point - that results from the conflicts and difficulties brought about through the complications of the plot. |
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| The crisis leads to this - that is, to the decision made by the protagonist to resolve the conflict. Sometimes the crisis and this are considered as two elements of the same stage of plot development. |
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| The "turning downward" of the dramatic plot, the fourth stage in the structure after the climax. |
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| The final stage of plot development, in which mysteries are explained, characters find their destinies, and the work is completed. The part of the play during which things are explained and put into place. |
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| That portion of the plot that reveals the final outcome of its conflicts or the solution of its mysteries. |
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