If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world... is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what... is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice--and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any campaign--like any good drama--will have its stylized performances. So too will it have one final dramatic element--a plot. Th...e classic unfolding story of any drama involves an introduction, rising action, turning point, falling action, and conclusion. A presidential campaign has all of these essentials--an introduction in the way of speculation about candidates "available" for party nominations; rising action in the form of early organizational efforts, qualifying for public funding, formal announcements, etc.; turning points in the multitude of caucuses and primaries leading to party conventions and nominations; falling action (spiced with unexpected events) in the general election campaign; and a conclusion on election day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which ev...eryone is married in the last act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of m...irth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the de...ssert, a bit like meringue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate b...etween God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations--all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fa...ct she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, cons...umer goods, status--all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »