act
One of the more or less equal divisions of Western plays, conventionally numbering one to five, usually marked by some combination of (a) an interruption of chronological continuity, (b) a ...
Alfred de Musset
(1810–57)French poet and dramatist. The youngest and most original of the romantic playwrights, Musset was little performed in his lifetime. After the failure of La Nuit vénitienne (1830), many ...
Arthur Miller
(1915–2005)US dramatist, regarded as one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century.The son of a Jewish manufacturer, Miller was born in New York City, where he suffered at first ...
Beth Henley
(1952?–),Mississippi-born playwright, attended Southern Methodist University, had her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, performed (1979) in Louisville, where it won a major local prize, ...
chorus
In ancient Greek tragedy, a group of performers who comment on the main action, typically speaking and moving together; a single character who speaks the prologue and other linking parts of the play, ...
couplet
[kup-lit]A pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same length; one of the most widely used verse forms in European poetry. Chaucer established the use of couplets in English, notably in the ...
curtain
Screen separating the stage from the auditorium. It was introduced into European theatres with the advent of enclosed theatre buildings in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the English theatre ...
epilogue
A concluding piece: in opera, for example, sometimes addressed directly to the audience, as in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. Term has been used as description of movts. in their syms. by Vaughan ...
Eugène Labiche
(1815–88)French playwright. Taking over from Scribe and his contemporaries the formula of comédie-vaudeville, Labiche wrote most of his plays in collaboration with other talented dramatists. ...
exposition
[Latin exposition ‘setting forth’]1. In modern rhetoric, discourse which is intended to inform an audience about something or to explain it to them (see also informational communication; information ...
Franz Xaver Kroetz
(1946– )German playwright. Kroetz came to attention in the late 1960s as one of a group of Bavarian and Austrian playwrights dedicated to regenerating dialect and local themes. In Work ...
geming xiandai xi
‘Revolutionary modern drama’, Chinese plays with revolutionary themes, the only theatrical repertoire permitted during the Cultural Revolution. Mao was not pleased to see ‘many Communists ...
Gerlind Reinshagen
(1926– )German dramatist. Best known as the author of experimental radio plays, Reinshagen's first theatre piece was Doppelkopf (Rummy, 1968). Her breakthrough came with Sonntagskinder (Sunday's ...
Hong Sheng
(c.1646–1704)Chinese author of Changshengdian (Palace of Lasting Life), a Kun opera in 50 scenes. Equated with Kong Shangren as an influential Qing Dynasty playwright, Hong, like Liang Chenyu a ...
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim
(c.935–c.1002)First known woman poet of the MA and first known author of dramas since antiquity. She wrote eight saints’ legends in rhymed verse, eight dramas mainly in prose, and ...
huajü
‘Spoken drama’, the Chinese term for Western-style drama with realistic dialogue. In 1907 in Tokyo a group of Chinese students, calling themselves Chunliu She (the Spring Willow Society), performed ...
improvisation
A perf. according to the inventive whim of the moment, i.e. without a written or printed score, and not from memory. It has been an important element in mus. through the centuries, viz. (1) from the ...
Indian theatre
Theatre in India in the English language pre-dates all the proscenium traditions in the Indian languages. The British constructed the first modern playhouses for their own communities in the ...
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz
(1751–92)German dramatist. A key figure in the Sturm und Drang movement, Lenz's first efforts were adaptations of Plautus which remained unperformed in his lifetime. More important are his plays ...
jatra
Bengali theatre form in Bangladesh and West Bengal in India, performed all night by large companies travelling to villages and small towns. Jatra is usually given in the open under ...
