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60 terms

THEA 100 review

Romanticism did not emphasize
minimal, claustrophobic settings.
Realist theatre has its roots in
a revolt against the intentional artifice of neoclassicism.
Besides an aesthetic overhaul, the realist theatre carried another agenda:
a rebellion against the contrived manners of the Royal era and the creation of a theatre with a distinctly democratic, anti-Royalist air.
Which movement, whose development paralleled but was essentially independent of realism, based its aesthetics on humanity's place in the natural environment?
The constructivist who broke with Stanislavsky's style of realist performance to create a "biomechanical" style of acting and direction was
Vsevold Meyerhold.
Which playwright pioneered both realist and antirealistic styles in his work, shifting from a belief that "Naturalists...are aware of the richness of the human soul" to an attempt to "reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream?"
August Strindberg
A stylized acting style is one in which
characters usually represent more than individual persons or personality types; they represent moral positions or forces of nature.
Which of the following is true of the antirealist aesthetic in the second third of the twentieth century?
No absolute single set of governing principles determined the course of this theatre, leaving artists free to stylize consciously.
Which production had the most violent premiere in theatre history, such that the audience shouted, hissed, threw things, shook fists at the stage, and fought duels after subsequent performances?
Jarry's Ubu Roi
The author of "Riders to the Sea" was:
John Millington Synge
From a practical standpoint, theatre may be considered a conservative institution because it conserves
the history and conventional way of working as a theatre.
Postmodern playwrights and directors are mainly concerned with
the discontinuity of meaning.
Postmodernism relates to previous artistic movements in all the following ways EXCEPT
postmodern theatre attempts to illuminate the received truths of realism.
The roots of postmodern theatre can be located in the arts phenomenon called
Flashbacks that are not clearly framed as such, shuttling instead between time zones without narrative warning, are examples of
nonlinear theatre
This theatre, formed by Joseph Chaikin in 1963, combined social improvisation with Brechtian techniques and used character as a vehicle for direct interaction with audiences.
The Open Theatre
Which American playwright created works, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and The Piano Lesson, that portray the entire twentieth-century history of black America?
August Wilson
Which of the following is NOT true of the role of women in the history of drama?
Women are more under-represented today in theatre than at any point since the 1650s.
Founded by Luis Valdez in 1965, which contemporary Chicano theatre was created to dramatize the farm workers' situation in California through didactic actos?
Teatro Campesino
An example of verbatim theatre, where the play consists of real-life speeches and interviews, would be
Stuff Happens
One difference between the playwright in Shakespeare's time and the contemporary playwright is that
the playwright no longer functions as a director but is now considered an independent artist.
Every person may be considered a playwright because
the unconscious stages an association of words and ideas when we sleep
The term "playwright" refers to
person who constructs and composes a play as a wheelwright makes a wheel.
The core element of every play is
The playwright works with two fundamental tools:
dialogue and physical action.
A play in which events are connected to each other in strict, chronological, cause-effect continuity, and in which dramatic experience attempts to convey a lifelike progression of experience through time, is classified as
continuous in structure and linear in chronology.
Which of the following is the most accurate statement of the audience's response to the drama?
Intrigue draws us into the world of the play; credibility keeps us there.
Which of the following is true of playwriting in bygone days?
Playwriting was considered so technically demanding a craft that playwrights spent long in-house apprenticeships as "company men," learning their skills through continual exposure in theatrical rehearsal and performance.
A play in which every character possesses an independence of intention and expression, and whose motivation appears sensible in the light of our general knowledge of psychology and human behavior, possesses
depth of characterization.
All of the following are signs of good characterization EXCEPT
he character appears as a pawn in the playwright's grand design and exists only to symbolize something.
Which of the following tasks belong to the director?
conceptualizing the play and giving it vision and purpose
Which of the following is true of the history of the director's role?
There has always been a director but not always an individual specifically charged with that role.
The ancient Greek word for director is
didaskalos, meaning "teacher."
AndréAntoine is primarily known as a ______ director.
Which of the following was one of several directors who not only fostered the development of realist and naturalist dramas but who also opened up the theatre to possibilities of psychological interpretation?
Harley Granville-Barker
Which of the following directors founded the Théâtre d'Art in Paris in 1890 as a direct assault upon the realist principles espoused by AndréAntoine?
Paul Fort
Which of the following is true of stylizing directors?
What is meant by the "concept" of a play?
the director's central idea which focuses his or her interpretation
A play's final repository is
the minds and memories of its audiences.
The public form of play analysis following a production is called
dramatic criticism.
Dramatic criticism usually appears in all the following forms EXCEPT
annotated versions of a playscript used in production.
Examples of theatres that have been created or sustained by governments or ruling elites include all of the following EXCEPT the
theatre of the absurd.
Why is the theatre in a strong position to force and focus public confrontation with social issues?
Most productions do not act as propaganda but present the issues in all their complexity as food for thought and as such focus public debate, stimulate dialogue, and turn public attention and compassion to important issues.
A play's relation to the individual stems from the fact that the best plays
link up with our deepest musings and help us to put our unconnected ideas into some sort of order or philosophy.
An audience member's aesthetic sensibility and response is
a composite of many individual reactions and therefore subjective.
Plays that deal with theatrical matter not simply as a vehicle but as a theme are called
metadrama or metatheatre.
Which of the following is NOT an example of a play that makes the theatre a matter in the play itself?
Sophocles' Oedipus The King
What word fits the definition of "that which holds the attention?"
The term mimesis means
What are the two fundamental notions of acting?
representational and presentational
The type of performing that asks the actor to enter the mind of the character being played is
representational acting.
Actors who studies human behaviors from a broad range of historical periods, countries, and social classes, so as to apply them when creating characters from a variety of dramatic styles, demonstrates a technique of the _________ mode of acting.
What is "The Method?"
an American acting style derived from the Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky's self-proclaimed system
Why did the Greek actor Polus, when playing the role of Electra, bring the ashes of his dead son onstage with him?
He wanted to cry real tears lamenting the "death" of his character's brother.
Who maintained that the actor should be "an unmoved and disinterested onlooker" and imitate emotion rather than feel it?
Denis Diderot
Today, the debate over inside or outside styles of acting
is largely diminished, with Stanislavsky and classical techniques both emphasized.
The term used for the technical skills needed for professional acting, focusing primarily on the voice and body, is
What description best characterizes our current relationship to virtuosity?
It is making a comeback since the heyday of the Method in the mid-twentieth century.