I tend to substitute the Aristotelean term character for community to describe more ensemble driven plays. The major dramatic question that is explored through the action in the play is: What to do with dad’s life insurance check?Ģ) CHARACTER (COMMUNITY) = Who, the protagonist and their relationship to the other characters and to the world they inhabit.
#Parts of a western drama how to#
The eldest son Walter Lee wants to utilize the check to open a liquor store, while his sister Beneatha wants to use the money to pay her college tuition, and their mother Lena Younger, the lawful beneficiary of the coveted insurance check, and therefore has the authority to make the ultimate decision about how to invest it and why. For example, in Lorraine Hansberry’s definitive play, A Raisin in the Sun, the patriarch is dead and his financially fraught family awaits his life insurance check. It is important to note that these elements are already at work in our playwriting, but the more we can identify them, the better we can employ each element, or not.ġ) PLOT = What, the main action, which can be described through the character’s objectives.
Below are the definitions I utilize to better understand the way in which each element helps me build a play. The 6 Aristotelean elements are plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle, and song.
In this essay, I intend to provide a brief elemental breakdown of the 6 Aristotelean elements of Drama to hopefully eliminate some of the anxiety around its use in academia and other writing workshops we frequent in our respective playwriting careers. While it is a skill we must develop in our field, not everyone is comfortable discussing their intimate life in public. We are met with questions like, “Could you identify the plot?” and “Who is the main character?” Some of these questions cause anxiety and lead to creative roadblocks because the process of creative writing can become intimate and such interrogation quite often appears intrusive.
Since the recent academicization of playwriting, more and more dramatic writing scholars are met with Poetics by Aristotle, and certain aspects of its content are reviewed, referenced, and reinforced to both comprehend and measure the efficacy of our plays. These were essentially the tools utilized to assess our ability to comprehend the stories we read in high school, and ultimately to measure the efficacy of our ability to imitate these structures through creative writing exercises like writing prompts and short stories.īut like many lessons in secondary education, these tools are absorbed, assessed, and rarely revisited explicitly unless the student pursues higher education in a field that demands continued exploration of the subject. Most of us encounter the 6 Aristotelean elements of Drama in an English course in high school in concert with a handful of creative writing standards we are taught like Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid of Dramatic Structure, or Northrop Frye’s U-shaped patterns of dramatic structure, etc.
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