Name That Play!
Genre & Style
Theatre Tools
Key Terms
Form & Production
100

In this ten-minute play, Sarah believes she is turning into an endangered bird.

A Rare Bird, by Bella Poynton.

100

This genre generally moves from threat to disaster, with the central character's fortunes falling.

Tragedy

100

This equation describes theatre as a performer, an idea, and an audience divided over what?

Time

100

This term describes the meaning implied beneath a character's literal words.

Subtext

100

This production element creates a visual world for the action and provides space for physical action.

Scenery

200

This Sophocles tragedy follows a king determined to discover the truth about the plague affecting his city.

Oedipus Tyrannus

200

This style emphasizes subjective experience, internal thoughts, and invisible emotional realities.

Expressionism

200

This reading method asks you to consider the significance of the title, characters, setting, and playwright before reading.

How to Read a Play

200

This is a clever statement that inverts a traditional platitude or expectation.

Epigram

200

This is the imaginary wall that separates actors from the audience.

The fourth wall

300

This Oscar Wilde comedy satirizes upper-class respectability, marriage, and false identities.

The Importance of Being Earnest

300

This comedic form exaggerates, mocks, exposes, or parodies recognizable social behaviors.

Satire

300

Elinor Fuchs uses this metaphor to encourage us to examine a play's entire dramatic world.

Planet

300

This character opposes the central character's objective or point of view.

Main Oppositional Character (MOC)

300

This stage configuration places the audience on one side of the stage, often separated by an arch.

Proscenium stage

400

This Sophie Treadwell play uses expressionism to reveal a woman's oppressive experience of modern life.

Machinal

400

In this acting style, the actor embodies a character realistically and generally preserves the illusion of reality.

Representational acting

400

Barbara Clayton identifies seven of these, including scenery, acting, lighting, sound, and audience.

The elements of theatrical production

400

This character differs sharply from the central character and reveals the central character's qualities.

Foil

400

This structure builds toward a climax with relatively few locations, characters, and events.

Climactic structure

500

This Javaad Alipoor production investigates the murder of Iranian pop star Fereydoun Farrokhzad through theatre, documentary, podcast, and multimedia.

Things Hidden Since the End of the World

500

This theatrical form makes the performance itself central, often using direct address, multimedia, and a disrupted fourth wall.

Postdramatic theatre

500

Aristotle's six elements are plot, character, thought, language, music, and this final element: what we see.

Spectacle

500

In tragedy, this describes the purging of pity and fear through drama, ideally producing emotional renewal.

Catharsis

500

This form of theatre draws attention to the fact that an audience is watching performers create a theatrical world.

Metatheatre