Quiz 2 Flashcards
Box set
Interior setting represented by flats forming three sides (the fourth wall being the proscenium line); first used around 1830 and common after 1850
Boulevard
Historically, the permanent home of the old fair theaters of eighteenth-century Paris, and later of the illegitimate houses where melodrama and comic opera flourished during the nineteenth century
Now refers to the district of the commercial theaters in Paris and means roughly what the word Broadway implies in the US
Broadway
In popular parlance, the area of New York City on and adjacent to the street named Broadway, where the commercial theater of the United States is concentrated
Burlesque
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theater, a form of “minor” drama popular in England and featuring satire and parody
In the US of the late nineteenth-century and the twentieth century, a kind of entertainment originally dependent on a series of variety acts, but later including elements of female display (including striptease) in its major offerings
After moving to the fringes of respectability by the 1940s, burlesque disappeared in the US by the late 1950s
Business
Activity performed by actors at given points in a performance, for example lighting a cigarette or cooking a meal
see also “lines of business”
Catharsis
Aristotle cited as the end cause of tragedy “the arousal and catharsis of such emotions [pity and fear]” a statement popularly understood to mean that tragedy “purges” fear and pity from the audience; but alternative interpretations suggest that tragedy arouses and satisfies such emotions within its own structure and characters
Highly controversial and elusive concept
Causality
Belief that human events have causes (and therefore consequences); as a result, events are seen as joined in a chain of cause and effect
Casual plot
Plot of linked, internally consistent cause and effect
Centering
Actor’s term for localization of human energy source in the body, usually in the abdomen
Character
One of Aristotle’s six parts of a play, the material of plot and the formal cause of thought; an agent (participant, doer) in the play whose qualities and traits arise from ethical deliberation
In popular parlance, the agents or “people” in a play
Chorus
In Greek drama of the fifth century BCE, a group of men (number uncertain) who sang, chanted, spoke, and moved, usually in unison, and who, with the actors (three in tragedy and five in comedy), performed the plays
In the Renaissance, a single character named Chorus who provided information and commentary about the action in some tragedies
In modern times, the groups that sing and/or dance in musical comedies, operettas, ballets, and operas
City or Great Dionysia
The major religious festival devoted to the worship of the god Dionysius in Athens
The first records of tragedy appeared at this festival in 534 BCE, and it is so called the home of tragedy
Classical
Specifically refers to that period of Greek drama and theater from 534 BCE to 336 BCE, (the advent of the Hellenistic period)
Loosely used now to refer to Greek and Roman drama and theater in general (a period dating roughly from the sixth-century BCE through the sixth-century CE, about twelve hundred years)
Climax
The highest point of plot excitement for the audience
Comedy
A form (genre) of drama variously discussed in terms of its having a happy ending; dealing with the material, mundane world; dealing with the low and middle classes; dealing with myths of rebirth and social regeneration; and so on
