Drama: Audience? Who Needs It?
Looking at the origins of drama helps understand what is expected by the audience.
We must look towards the Greek for this information. If you recall your
lessons in history, you would remember the idea of the Greek City State. Citizens were
expected to be loyal not just to the ruler but to the community. One of the ways
this was taught was through dramatic reenactments of moral and ethical issues that might
occur to the common person. The rulers would call upon dramatists to create
dramas particular to an issue that was controversial at that moment. These dramas
would be performed in arenas where attendance by the populace was mandatory.
Because the audience was supposed to learn something from the play, the plot,
characters and theme were explicit. While they were explicit, complexity and
intrigue flourished. In the agon, a contest of wills so to speak, a
protagonist was pitted against an antagonist. The protagonist, of course,
represented a faithful member of the City State; the antagonist was usually a crafty,
attractive enemy.
Through a series of complications set in place by the antagonist, the protagonist
reached that point where she or he would rise above the situation or not. Read the
play Antigone, or check the video out from the library, to understand
this better. Through all of this, the audience is an integral part of the action.
Remembering that "theater" derives from the Greek word 'theatron,' which
contains the stem of the verb 'theasthai,' `to view as spectators' will help you
understand how important audience is to the play.
"Drama," a Greek word meaning `action', relates to the verb 'dran', `to do'.
The author of a tragedy was not just a writer of a script. The author then had
to perform the additional tasks of training the actors and chorus and of composing the
music for the various songs of the actors and chorus and providing choreography for the
chorus. Scenery, inflection of actors' voices, actors' gestures and postures,
costumes and masks, singing, dancing, sounds of the original language and its various
poetic rhythms. Thus, a play had to be viewed in order to truly be understood.
With this foundation, I hope you are ready for exercise 4,
your own venture into drama.