Drama Hides -- Realizing this Skill connected with Drama.

 Drama, like poetry and fiction, is an art form of words. In drama, the words are mainly dialogue: people talking are the basic dramatic action. The talk might be interrupted by wordless activity sword-fighting, love scenes, silence but such activity will derive its significance from its script or context of dialogue.

Or even, we are coping with pantomime and not with drama. In general theory, however, the line between drama and the related arts is not too simple to draw. Film is even less literary than theater, and yet film scripts have now been published to be read. At what point of verbal artistry do they cease being scenario and production notes and become drama? Conversely, as to the extent is the concept of drama included in Pirandello's "three boards and a passion" as a formula for theater?

Such questions are posed by the double part of dramatic language. As written words, drama is literature; as spoken words in a spectacle, it is theater. Dialogue could be performed directly, intact, but stage directions, however skillfully written, do not survive the transfer from script to stage.Dramacool

Their referents in performance speech manner, movement, costume, drama masks set, etc. - are creations of the theater rather than of literature. The fact that successful playwrights earn more money in the box office than in the bookstores is evidence that for most of us the theatrical medium of drama masks and film acting takes precedence within the literary one and that they find reading a play a pallid replacement for seeing it.

As stage spectacle a play is intensely there a three-dimensional and audible progress of coherent, absorbing, physical action. 'While words are consecutive and reading is an act in the time dimension, seeing a play is an experience of both time and space.

At any one moment the spectator might be simultaneously alert to weather or time of day or of rich or shabby furniture, or of one character speaking, another listening, and someone crawling noiselessly toward the speaker with a knife between his teeth. The spatial concreteness and immediacy of staged drama enlist the interest of a bigger set of the spectator's sensory responses, and do this more intensely, compared to the purely imaginative evocations of printed play ever can.

Still, the favorite assumption that the theatrical medium of drama is primary might be challenged. Performance is no more the play compared to the concert could be the symphony. Most plays, like symphonies have now been written to be performed, nevertheless the artistic construct exists complete in the written words, just while the melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, and orchestration of the symphony "are" in the printed score. The sole difference between a printed play and a printed musical composition in this respect is that for the majority of us it now is easier to "see" and "hear" a play in the imagination than it is to "hear" the music in the read score.