Saint's Play

See miracle play.

Satire

A humorous play or other work in which people, attitudes, or types of behaviour are ridiculed for the purpose of correcting their blameworthy qualities. Satirists differ from other types of comic writers in that they are often morally outraged by the follies and vices they depict. Of all types of comedy, satire is the most critical. It can also, paradoxically, be the most subtle, for satirists may mask their fury with humour so effectively that they can seem to be condoning the faults they abhor. Satire often makes use of irony and frequently targets politicians and other public figures. For this reason, satire tends to flourish in liberal societies where free speech is prized. See also Old Comedy and comedy of manners.

Satyr Play

Ancient Athenian genre of comical drama, usually a mythological burlesque, which was performed by a singing and dancing chorus dressed in satyr costume (a furry loincloth to which a goat's tail and artificial penis were attached, plus a mask depicting an ugly snubbed nose, high forehead, and goat's ears). In Greek myth, satyrs were the drunken, randy, rabble­rousing attendants of Dionysus, in whose honour all theatre was performed in ancient Greece. Satyr plays were staged as part of the Greek tragic tetralogy, either as the first or the last play of the four. See also pastoral drama.

Scenography

Also called "set design" or "stage design," scenography is often preferred today as a term to describe the visual and spatial aspects of a theatrical production. This is because many artists working in the theatre do not design only the sets, but also the costumes and sometimes even the lighting, too, for a unified effect. Scenography also implies that the creation of a beautiful and functional environment on stage is a specialized art form, not merely a variant of other types of design.

Score

The musical text of an opera, operetta, or musical, as written by a composer, containing parts for singers and musicians.

Screenplay

The written text used in the making of a movie. It describes the sequence of shots and camera angles that will be used in the telling of the story, as well as what the characters do and say. Screenplays are often based on pre-existing stage-plays and novels.

Set Design

See scenography.

Situation Comedy

Humorous play or other performed story concerning everyday domestic trials and tribulations within families and/or between friends and neighbours. Love, marriage, wealth, and family or neighbourhood harmony are usually the focus of sitcoms. The jokes are generated by awkward or complex situations involving false assumptions, mistaken identities, and attempts to trick others out of money, prestige, or lovers. Sitcoms often feature stock characters such as the braggart, the parasite, the clever servant, the stupid servant, the violent cook, and so on. See also New Comedy and convention.

Sk¯en¯e

Greek for "scene house." Referred to the covered, indoor portion of the Theatre of Dionysus in ancient Athens that was used by the actors for entrances, exits, and changes of costumes and masks. The sk¯en¯e also housed the theatre's special-effects machinery. In fifth-century tragedy, the scene house generally represented a palace or temple with its large central doors. In later centuries, scene buildings were constructed with new architectural features such as multiple openings and rows of pillars for receiving painted scenery; in such Hellenistic theatres, the sk¯en¯e was expanded and divided into an upper and a lower stage (or proskenion; see proscenium).

"Social Problem" Plays

Dramas, usually from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that focused on specific topical and controversial issues such as prostitution, slum landlordism, venereal disease, and other malaises of modern society. Associated with Shaw and Ibsen in particular, and often closely related to the plays of Naturalism.

Sound-scape

Named by analogy with "landscape," a sound-scape is the totality of sound-effects, ambient noises and music used by a sound-designer or director as the aural background for a production.

Stage Design

See scenography.

Stage Directions

The written but unspoken parts of a play text, sometimes provided by the playwright and sometimes by later editors, that describe gestures, stage action, or technical effects (set changes, music cues, etc.). It was very rare until the nineteenth century, when detailed staging instructions became routine. With the rise of the director in the twentieth century, the freedom of theatre artists to determine the stage action for themselves has been energetically asserted, and for this reason stage directions are considered nonessential parts of the play by many theatre practitioners today.

Stichomythia

One of the meters of Greek dramatic poetry, used for the rapid exchange of short lines of dialogue between two speakers, approximating the effect of a witness under cross­examination. Of all Greek verse forms, it is the most definitive of drama and most strongly contrasted with its long monologue passages, which remain closer to earlier forms of epic poetry and choral lyric. See also iambic dialogue.

Stock Characters

Personality types in dramatic literature that recur so often that their particular collection of character traits, their professions, and sometimes even their names and costumes have become fixed. Some genres of theatre consist almost entirely of stock characters, such as the commedia dell'arte. Since this convention is much more typical of comedy than tragedy, great comic actors will often devote their entire careers to perfecting, developing, and even radically reinterpreting one of these stock characters, which are sometimes called "masks," in honour of the masked improvisers of the Italian comedy tradition. See also caricature, New Comedy, and situation comedy.

Sturm und Drang

German for "Storm and Stress." A literary movement that took its name from the title of an F.M. von Klinger play of 1776, and which was one of the earliest manifestations of Romanticism. It is associated particularly with the work of Goethe and Schiller.

Subplot

A secondary narrative embedded within the main one that usually comments on, contrasts with, or in some other way illuminates the primary line of action in a play or other literary work. Subplots usually mirror the events related in the main plot, except transposed to a different and often lower social plane or tone.

Surrealism

One of the many influential schools within modernism. Like realism, to which it obviously refers, surrealism incorporates elements of the true appearance of life and nature; but unlike realism, it combines these elements according to a logic more typical of dreams than of waking life. Isolated aspects of surrealist art may create powerful illusions of reality, but the effect of the whole is to disturb or question our sense of reality rather than to confirm it.

Symbolism

The use of signs, visible images, or other sensuous effects to represent invisible or intangible ideas.

Symbolist Theatre

A movement based in late-nineteenth-century Paris in which playwrights, following the lead of Symbolist poets and painters, tried to convey invisible emotional or spiritual truths through a careful orchestration of atmosphere and symbolism. Most of the works of the Symbolist theatre were presented at either Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art or Aurélien Lugné-Poë's Théâtre de l'Oeuvre .


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