The elements of a drama Reading Khan Academy

hello readers today let us talk about drama enter stage right and let us tread the boards together drama also known as theater or plays is specialized kind of story that is meant to be performed if you've ever seen movie television show or play or if you've ever heard play on the radio or through podcast you've experienced the magic of the dramatic arts writing drama is different than writing poem or story and that means that reading one is different too so i'm going to show you part of short drama on the khan academy website in order to go through the parts of play okay so here we have the title of the piece my unusual aunt but it's followed by something you maybe haven't seen before which is the cast of characters this tells us who's in the play 12 year old named isabella and her aunt yasmin now these are the characters that actors will be performing in the drama there may be other people referenced like for example in this piece isabella refers to her dad being asleep in scene two but he never shows up on stage play is divided into scenes which you can think of like chapters in book scenes are sections of drama that are separated by time or location scene 1 takes place in the evening outside scene 2 takes place at isabella's house sometime later how do we know that the setting and stage directions so this italic slanty text here in the brackets tells us where the scene is set in time and space it says evening isabella is walking her dog stanley bat dives down the name isabella is in all capital letters to make sure the actor playing isabella notices and from this we know several things isabella is in this scene she's outside she's walking her dog and it's night time so if this were stage play we'd maybe see set that looks like isabella's neighborhood she's walking the dogs maybe we'd see little bit of sidewalk or fire hydrant there's more italics in this bit and it's what are called stage directions an actor wouldn't read this aloud during performance instead stage directions tell the team putting drama together what is happening on stage so bat dives down that's going to be puppet or prop operated by puppeteer or stagehand and then we have this line of dialogue spoken by isabella reacting to the bat ugh since when do we have bats in the neighborhood come on stanley let's run home so characters have lines the character name indicates which character is speaking sometimes you'll have stage direction just before line of dialogue as we can see in scene two and yasmine points to giant trunk before she talks but the actor playing her wouldn't say pointing at giant trunk aloud that's physical action the script is asking her to perform these are the basic components of stage play the characters and their descriptions the way the play is divided into scenes the stage directions that tell actors and others what to do and the lines of dialogue that actors have to deliver aloud these are the building blocks of play and now that you know that you know just enough to be dangerous go write play tell it sent you you can learn anything dave it out