Introduction
Think about your favorite movie. What is it that makes it your very favorite? Is it the characters? Is it the setting? Or is it how the story is told? What surprises, twists, and turns does the story take you on before the characters can finally be happy, or does it have a happy ending at all?
Drama, like literature and movies, often follows a traditional format of storytelling called dramatic structure or play structure. Usually, but not always, plays can be broken down into six main parts to discuss their plot. These are: exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Exposition provides the audience with the information they need to know about what happened before the play began. For example in Titanic, early in the film the audience meets Jack and Rose, and learns about the great unsinkable ship. The audience learns the information they need to know in order to understand the characters and plot of the film. Conflict occurs when an incident arises that begins the main action of the play. In a film like Titanic, the main plot begins when Jack and Rose meet for the first time when she attempts suicide. The rising action is a series of events that escalate the action, to continue our Titanic example, that Rose’s mother and her fiancée, Cal, attempt to keep her and Jack apart when they begin to fall in love, are all examples of rising action. The plot doubles down on rising action when the ship hits the iceberg.The climax is the moment of greatest tension within a story, which, in the case of our example, is when the ship splits in two and begins to sink. The falling action in a play depicts the aftermath of the climax, like when Jack and Rose are clinging to a piece of wood in the ocean waiting to be rescued. The resolution is when the conflict is resolved or eliminated, such as when Rose is rescued and provides her name as Rose Dawson, taking Jack’s last name as her own.
Play Structure
What is Dramatic Structure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKuTja1s6nM
Just like a novel or a poem, a play will have some sort of structure. The traditional plot of a play will consist of an exposition, action leading to a climax, and a denouement or resolution. A certain amount of information about characters and events is necessary at the start of a play, and sometimes an explanation of what has happened in the past is required for the audience to make sense of what is to follow: all this is accomplished through the exposition. Some skill is necessary if the exposition is to be interesting, and subtle, natural-seeming, not holding the action up for too long. The plays of Ibsen offer a particularly interesting variation on this theme, since the action of the play is in fact to unravel those happenings in the past that have led to the present consequences that the play is concerned with. It has been said that his plays are one long exposition.
Many modern plays eschew this sort of structure. Waiting for Godot, for instance, which has been described as a play in which nothing happens – twice, has two acts that parallel each other rather than making any sort of forward movement. The idea of climax is subverted by the absence of any excitement, the ‘action’ consists of intentions that fail to be implemented, and any sense of final resolution is denied. At the end of the play, the tree, which at the opening has been bare, may have gained four or five leaves, but the characters remain as they were in the beginning. In another break with tradition, the first act of Top Girls uses characters that are not seen or referred to at all in the rest of the play, and the final scene backtracks to a year before the previous one, so that the end of the play does not coincide with the end of the action it purports to represent. In the BBC performance on the video the order of the first two scenes is reversed, so that we are introduced to one of the characters who will be central in the rest of the play, but the scene in the Top Girls agency with which it now starts is not an exposition in the traditional sense. It perhaps makes more sense when discussing drama of the twentieth century and later to think of exposition in terms of themes.
In working out the structure of a play, particularly where the acts are divided into a number of scenes, as in Shakespeare, it can be helpful to make brief summaries of the scenes. These summaries will not only help to clarify the action, but are later useful for revision purposes.
Before the denouement can take place, there are two key features identified by Aristotle that are still important in any drama: anagnorisis, which can be translated as recognition or discovery, and peripeteia, or a change from one state of affairs to its opposite, a reversal of fortune. The famous example used by Aristotle to illustrate his theory is that of Oedipus Rex. Once Oedipus, king of Corinth, has recognized that it was he himself who, unknowingly, killed his father and thus condemned the city to relentless plague, he puts out his own eyes and goes into voluntary exile, thus reversing his fortunes.
Approaching Plays. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-plays/content-section-5
“What is Dramatic Structure?”. Licensed under Standard Youtube License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKuTja1s6nM
Summary
These six core elements of dramatic plot and play structure (exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution) appear in a number of plays, films, television shows, and pieces of literature. However, these are not hard and fast rules for how to tell a story, not every play must adhere to them, in fact, some genres and styles of drama are founded on breaking these rules. As an exercise, try to identify these elements in the next movie or television program you watch, you’ll be surprised at how ubiquitous these elements of plot actually are!
Thinking about a play’s structural elements helps us to know what to expect as we read. These terms also provide clearer vocabulary for discussing dramatic plots. In addition to being divided into acts and scenes, plays are also divided into segments based on the action and plot that occurs within them.
