PART 2

教师进入Reading Drama讲解：

The magic of theatre depends on the power of spectacle, by which we mean all the sights and sounds of performance-- the faintest whisper or the loudest cry, the slightest twitch or the boldest thrust of a sword.

Elements that make up the total spectacle include: setting, costuming, props, blocking (the arrangement of characters on the stage), movement, gestures, intonation, and pacing (the tempo and coordination of performance).

Q1: How does spectacle functions in drama?

A1: Spectacle brings the fictional world of a play to life in the theatre. Our thoughts and feelings are provoked by the spectacles as much as by the words themselves.

Q2: What are the 6 elements of drama?

A2: In Poetics (350 BC), Aristotle listed the elements in order of importance as he viewed them: plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle.

Q3: What are the differences between reading a play and seeing a play?

Hint: While reading is an act in the time dimension, seeing a play is an experience of both time and space. While reading drama, we are like directors planning a production and determine the perspective from which it will be staged. While seeing drama, we see the characters, costumed and moving within a specified setting, and to mentally hear the lines and the tones. We might also like to see the characters under lights and imagine every detail of a possible production, such as shades of make-up, loudness of sound effects.

Q4: What should a drama reader do in the reading process?

A4: Drama readers can make full use of their imagination, perception, and experience to interpret a play. They can visualize the play as a theatre performance, seeing it enacted in their mind’s eye as if on a real stage by real actors moving, talking and gesticulating. Moreover, the absence of authorial description, discussion and narration in a play offers its readers a greater opportunity to make their own judgment.

(1)A play has to take place somewhere. Details about the locale create the tone. Eugene O'Neill in Desire under the Elms sets his doomed characters in the Puritan New England around 1850, about seventy years before the writing of the play. The stark setting of the farmland, which suggests a life as hard as the soil, gives a sense of foreboding, of inherent disaster. The two elms that “brood oppressively over the house” are like the twisted love affair between Eben and Abbie, which seems to grow inevitably from the climate of frustration, envy, and antipathy in which the characters have to live.

Summaries of Desire under the Elms

Ephraim Cabot is an old man of amazing vitality who loves his New England farm with a greedy passion. Hating him, and sharing his greed, are the sons of two wives Cabot has overworked into early graves. Most bitter is Eben, whose mother had owned most of the farm, and who feels who should be sole heir. When the old man brings home a new wife, Anna, she becomes a fierce contender to inherit the farm. Two of the sons leave when Eben gives them the fare in return for their shares of the farm. Meanwhile, Anna tries to cause some sparks by rubbing up against Eben.

(2) Stage directions specify gestures and costumes because a play is not simply words but words spoken with accompanying gestures by performers who are usually costumed and in a particular setting. Gestures, as non-verbal communication, are clear indications of aspects of characters. Costumes are extensions of characters and identify them as soldiers or farmers or priests. Changes of costume can be especially symbolic. Macbeth, for instance, first appears as a soldier. Later he wears the robes of a king, but he appears again as a warrior at the end of the play. And the sight of an armed Macbeth reminds the audience of the heroic soldier of the play's beginning. Aside from gestures and costumes, we need to pick up cues about the movements and spatial relations of the characters at every moment in the scene.

(3) Pay attention to whatever sound effects are specified in the play. In Death of a Salesman, “a melody is heard,” before the curtain goes up, “played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.” Then the curtain rises, revealing the salesman’s house, with towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides.” The sound of the flute, as an additional element in the setting, obviously is meant to tell us of the world that the salesman is shut off from (Teacher plays the video).

(4) Pay attention to silences, including pauses within speeches or between speeches. In Othello old Brabantio, a senator in Venice, says to Iago, “Thou art a villain,” and Iago replies, “You are-- a senator.” The dash here probably suggests a significant pause, a change of mind of the speaker, who evidently wants to say “You are a fool.” Since Iago's reply is informationless and thus goes against maxims of the cooperative principle in social interaction, it produces some implicature, a kind of extra meaning that is not contained in the utterance -- he wants to be polite.

(5) We learn not only to listen to the eloquence of their silence, but to respond to the revealing remark or gesture of the characters. The dialogue does not convey information only. It reveals characters and themes. Peter Brook, an influential British director and theorist of drama, says in his The Empty Space that the word is a tiny visible part in a gigantic invisible structure, and its functions as means of communication between audience and stage. What the characters say and do begins to make sense only as we learn more about them. They reveal their antecedents and their present situations, their motives and purposes.

The Plot Structure

Q5: What is plot?

A5: Plot is the way the playwright has chosen to tell his story, the detailed arrangement of incidents for maximum meaning or beauty or suspense.

The plot must have some sort of unity and clarity by setting up a pattern by which each action initiating the next rather than standing alone without connection to what came before it or what follows.

Q6: What is the basic element of dramatic plot?

A6: Peripety. The Greek word “peripetia” anglicized, meaning a sudden change or reversal of fortune in tragedy. While conflict is basic to drama, peripety renders conflict dramatic.

FREYTAG'S PYRAMID: A diagram of dramatic structure, one which shows complication and emotional tension rising like one side of a pyramid toward its apex, which represents the climax of action. Once the climax is over, the descending side of the pyramid depicts the decrease in tension and complication as the drama reaches its conclusion and denouement. A sample chart is available to view. Freytag designed the chart for discussing tragedy, but it can be applied to many kinds of fiction.

Q7: The technical structure of a serious play is necessitated by the development of the dramatic conflict. A well-built tragedy will commonly show the following divisions, each representing a phase of the dramatic conflict. What are they?

A7: Introduction, rising action, climax or crisis (turning point), falling action, and catastrophe.

Q8: How does each part function in the structure of a five-act tragedy? Explain each of the phase with plots from Hamlet.

A8: (1) The introduction (or exposition) gives the setting, sets the tone, and presents the established situation from which the play takes rise.

In Hamlet, the bleak midnight scene on the castle platform, with the appearance of the ghost, sets the keynote of the tragedy, while the conversation of the watchers, especially the words of Horatio, supply antecedent facts, such as the quarrel between the dead King Hamlet and the King of Norway.

(2) The inciting incident (or the exciting force).

In Hamlet the ghost's revelation to Hamlet of the murder) begins the rising action, in which new factors complicate the original situation. The rising action continues through successive stages of conflict between the hero and the counterplayers up to the climax or turning point (in Hamlet the hesitating failure of the hero to kill Claudius at prayer).

(3) The climax, a special kind of peripety, is called the central peripety. The turning point reverses the direction of the action.

Hamlet stabs Polonius through the arras is the stories climax. At this point he puts himself in direct conflict with the people around him, especially the King. But Polonius is also Ophelia's father, therefore another conflict arises with the fact that he's just killed the father of the woman he loves.

(4) In tragedy the falling action stresses the activity of the forces opposing the hero and while some suspense must be maintained, the trend of the action must lead logically to the disaster with which the tragedy is to close.

In Hamlet it is the “blind” stabbing of Polonius, which sends Hamlet away from the court just as he appears about to succeed in his plans. The latter part of the falling action is sometimes marked by an event called the “moment of final suspense,” which days the catastrophe and aids in maintaining interest, though the falling action is usually shorter than the rising action.

(5) The catastrophe comes as a natural outgrowth of the action. It marks the tragic failure of the hero, usually the death of the hero and often his opponents as well, such as in the case of Hamlet.

The millenniums-old drama has witnessed a great variety of plot patterns. Greek tragedy featured a tightly-knit simple structure. Medieval plays had loose episodes bound together by a single theme. The Elizabethan drama often involved several sets of characters in overlapping situations. The Naturalists attempted to avoid any semblance of structure in their “slice-of-life” plays. Modern experimental trends such as expressionism, theatre of the absurd and epic theatre, had little regard for disciplined, formulaic plot.

The Rhythm of Tension and Release

Q9: What feelings should drama provides with audience?

A9: Good drama is the presence of suspense, tension, conflict and the rhythm of tension and release.

Q10: What is the rhythm of tension and release, and how does it function in drama?

A10: A sense of the alternation of tension and release exists in a series of entanglements whether the action of the play is rising or it is falling. In fact, a good management of the rhythm of tension and release makes the stage time seem much shorter than it really is. Ideally, the playwright is like a juggler who throws a few balls into the air. When one descends, he throws up another, always leaving as many in the air as he can, so that audience keep asking what will happen to this one and that, until there is a decreasing number of balls in the air. and crisis finally gives way to resolution.

Plot Overview

Desire Under the Elms, tragedy in three parts by Eugene O’Neill, produced in 1924 and published in 1925. The last of O’Neill’s naturalistic plays and the first in which he re-created the starkness of Greek tragedy, Desire Under the Elms draws from Euripides’ Hippolytus and Jean Racine’s Phèdre, both of which feature a father returning home with a new wife who falls in love with her stepson.

In this play Ephraim Cabot abandons his farm and his three sons, who hate him. The youngest son, Eben, buys out his brothers, who head off to California. Shortly after this, Ephraim returns with Abbie, his young new wife. Abbie becomes pregnant by Eben; she lets Ephraim believe that the child is his, thinking the child will secure her hold on the farm, but she later kills the infant when she sees it as an obstacle between her and Eben. Enraged, Eben turns Abbie over to the sheriff, but not before he realizes his love for her and confesses his complicity.

Hint: In Part One of Desire under the Elm tension is obvious even in Scene One of Part One, when the two older brothers think of leaving home for California, where there is gold, but they don’t want to give up the two thirds of the share of the farm where they have toiled since childhood. However, Scene Four ends with temporary harmony. When their younger brother Eben learns that Ephraim is taking a new wife home, the news destroys their hope and they decide to exchange the share with Eben for six hundred dollars and leave for California to join the gold rush. So Eben is left to deal with Abbie. Soon new crisis emerges for both Eben and Abbie in the beginning of Part Two. Eben hate Abbie, who wants to make everything hers, though he is physically attracted to Abbie. Abbie also experiences crisis because Ephraim promises to give Abbie the farm if a son is born to them. Without a son Abbie will get nothing. We see Eben torn between his burning lust for Abbie and hatred of her as a threat to his attempt to inherit the farm. In the parlor scene of Part Two we see how the crisis gives way to resolution in the consummation of the incestuous relationship, in which Abbie is motivated by her desire for a child and lust for Eben, while Eben is motivated by his desire for Abbie as a mother figure and a mistress to punish his father. Once again Part Two ends with temporary harmony since Eben feels that he gets even with his father, and his mother can rest in peace.