Important Terms in Theatre

Key Terms:

Theatre: theatron, which means “to see” or “place of seeing”. It’s a building or a stage designed for live public performances. The theatre is a subculture of artists and craftspeople who spend their lives in the business of “adult make-believe”. It’s a noun and verb, as well as both culture & subculture. EQUATION: A (actor) pretends to be X (Character) while S (Spectator) looks on.

What (Live) Theatre includes: Reality (time, place and people), occasion and action. Ephemerality, nothing left of the work of art itself, traces remain, but the event itself is vanished. Mimesis, has representation and imitation.

A Critics Basic Questions: Oscar Brockett
Understanding: “What were they trying to do?” ex. Vagina Monologues
Effectiveness: “How well did they do it?”
Worth: “Was is worth doing?”

Why do we read a critics essay? To find out more about the performance, to share the experience with someone who hasn’t seen it and should or not see it. To gain some insight and to hear another person’s opinion.

What is the nature of the performance? Not a summary of events, but an account of the experience.

What is distinctive about this performance?

What leaves an impression?

What’s the story and how has it been told? Understanding what’s the story and what the performance is trying to tell.

How is the performance done?
Acting: how have particular characters been constructed?
Design: how has the environment been constructed?
Direction: What’s the overall sense of mise-en-scene? That which you perceive in the theatre.

What is distinctive about this performance? How are the choices difference from other choices you have seen, or choices that might have you have made?

How well has the company done? Is the story effective in its own terms.

How Successful is the performance?
Technical Judgment: effective choices, distracting errors
Aesthetic Judgment: is the story worth telling?
Personal Opinion

Directors: looks at the whole picture as opposed to an actors one part. He looks at the mise-en-scene, the whole of the audiences’ perception and this is his medium. There are two models of controlling elements: authority—top down control of the stage picture, collaboration—bottom-up organization of the artists. Approaches to the Play:
1. Transcription: “I render the playwrights vision faithfully “on stage”.
2. Translation: “I translate the spirit of the play to the stage”
3. Transformation: “I transform and re-shape source material to create a new play” mostly true of film and Shakespearean plays.
4. Transcend: “I invent in the medium of the stage” eliminates the playwright

Relationships with the Team: 1. Partnership
2. Auteur/Visionary
3. Collective
4. Playwright/composer
Melodrama: music accompanying dialogue it is a technique used to intensify the emotional pace of a play.

Two Theatrical Approaches: Phenomena (observation, AT, real concrete)
Semiotics (interpretation, through)