The play, "The Comedy of Errors," turns out to be precisely what the title claims. It is a play about magic and illusion in a faraway country. "The Comedy of Errors" shows how a series of confused identities eventually leads to chaos in a community, and just how deceiving appearances can be. The...

Comedy and tragedy in Antigone and Lysistrata Horace Warpole wrote "The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who think, a comedy to those who feel." This quote holds much truth behind its meaning. It can also be translated to mean that comedy evokes though...

Over the weekend, I attended a one-act play competition to see the high school I graduated from in their presentation of Act IV of Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors." I didn't know what to expect, having never read or seen the play, but I was excited because Shakespeare is always entertainin...

Problem of Genre in Drama When a reader thinks of a play that has been labeled a comedy he thinks of light-hearted and happy plots. The reader would not think of family tension, arguments or even perversion. The genre of comedy takes on the responsibility of making the audience laugh and walk awa...

In 500 B.C., Greek theatre was the most popular form of entertainment. It is important to understand that drama began in the Greek world as a form of religious ritual, but it was good entertainment especially if it contained a lot of blood or gore. Greek drama was not only performed in the theatre b...

Romantic Comedies Most women are hopeless romantics, it's just that some do a much better job at hiding it than others. I'm sure that everyone has known someone in their lifetime who complains constantly about their significant other and simply wishes to find the perfect guy/girl. But ...

Have you ever watched a film and found yourself laughing at something grotesque? Many films try to make things comical that are typically frowned upon. It is important that a film does not make the audience uncomfortable but to use enough black comedy to make a film comical. What's Eating Gi...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is an excellent, humorous play written by Shakespeare. It is highly characteristic of Shakespeare, bringing several subplots into one masterful story. I have seen this play presented in a classical format and I found it thoroughly entertaining. Directed by Robin McKee, ...

Sunddenly, Bob dashes out into the audience and jokingly asks one of the audience members if she would like to catch a movie after the play. This type of thig was typical at The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in Samuel Park in Dallas. It was an entertaining comedy with many themes and ma...

Who the Heck is Neil Simon? Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Odd Couple, The Out-of-Towners, The Sunshine Boys – are just a few of Neil Simon's most successful plays which have kept millions of people amused for many years now. His success in the playwriting business has earned him resp...

"To what extent can 'Under Milk Wood' be considered a 'play for voices'?" Under Milk Wood When most people think of a play, they think of dressing up and going to the theatre; costumes; romance and comedy; ice cream at the interval and, of course, pantomimes. D...

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Much like the great comedies of our time, the play, "Tartuffe," is founded on serious issues. The 17th-century comedy, written by Moliere, achieves a representation of human nature through farce and satire. Moliere had a method of portraying life that could not be matched, not even by the likes of...

"Lobby Hero" is a comedy/romance about a young security guard named Jeff, who has had a rough time after being dishonorably discharged from the Navy for smoking marijuana. The setting of the play is in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan, New York. The only demanding element of J...

Summary of the Introduction Chikamatsu Monzaemon was born in Echizen, Japan in 1653 with the name of "Sugimore Nobumori" and was to become perhaps the greatest dramatist in the history of the Japanese theater. Most of his early history is unknown. His father, a samurai, gave up his feudal respon...

The production I critiqued is "Fairy Tale Follies" by A. J. Jacobs, done by the high school students of Foothills Academy. Despite the fact that they had a small cast and crew, the production was quite enjoyable. The play itself did not really follow Aristotle's components of drama,...

No Exit No Exit was a dark play about the afterlife and what it may be like. The play actually seemed to have some dark comedy to it, when it was preformed on stage. The pay is about three souls of recently deceased people, with three very different personalities. Each one is added at a t...

Max Reinhardt can be described as one of the greatest theatrical directors in history. A great innovator and a master of spectacle, he staged gigantic productions full of pageantry and color. Reinhardt became one of the first theatrical directors to achieve widespread recognition as a major creativ...

American Buffalo is a funny play. It doesn't overflow with jokes, but develops sustained humour from the rhythm of the dialogue, a rolling punch line that builds for an hour and a half. It's hard to nail down. Imagine someone who doesn't understand English listening to Lenny Bruce on a riff. The...

The Importance of Sound Theater is an extremely involved and complex production. It encompasses play writing, directing, acting, costume, makeup, scenery, lighting properties, theater architecture, machinery, special effects, management, audiences, and criticism (Brockett-b xi). What this ...

The Importance of Sound Theater is an extremely involved and complex production. It encompasses play writing, directing, acting, costume, makeup, scenery, lighting properties, theater architecture, machinery, special effects, management, audiences, and criticism (Brockett-b xi). What this ...

Scene Eleven from the play "Mother Courage and Her Children" and Act One, Scene Four from "Summer of the Aliens" are scenes that are performed very differently, according to their theatrical styles and using conventions relating to those styles. The context in each scene is diverse, too, however...

MOTHER COURAGE: A LEGACY OF SURVIVAL Mother Courage is an unbraidable knot of contradictions: both fearless and feckless, wise and uneducable, maternally caring and emotionally aloof. A camp-following trader, she picks the bones of a war-withered economy to feed her fatherless children. Yet her ...

Modern drama began by turning toward realism and away from the fantasy of nineteenth-century melodrama and farce. Realism gave rise to various innovations that served to express the dramatist's vision of what reality is. These attempts to be " more real than real" can be called expressionism. ...

The Playwright's Company: Saving the Art on Broadway The period in history from the Depression up until the beginnings of World War II were financially bleak for Broadway Theatre. The number of productions being produced were also down. Producers were going bankrupt left and rig...