Pageant-Wagons

Wheeled and elaborately decorated parade floats used as mobile stages in England for the performance of Bible-cycle plays, or mystery plays. They were sometimes built on two levels, with trap doors and mechanical devices for raising angels or thrones up to heaven. Actors drew them through the streets of market towns along a prearranged route, either by hand or horse, stopping intermittently at fixed performance locations to enact their portion of the Biblical narrative. Many wagons were stored through the year in covered sheds and brought out on Corpus Christi day.

Panathenaia

"All-Athenian," a large ancient Greek summer festival featuring contests, prizes, and religious rituals, specializing in the competitive recitation of epic poetry.

Pantomime

Originally a genre of virtuoso solo performance invented by the ancient Romans. It is usually used today to refer to a type of spectacular entertainment that emerged in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century, featuring commedia dell'arte characters, magical special-effects wizardry, music, dance, and fantastical episodic plots. It remained very popular into the nineteenth century, when it picked up certain features of melodrama and developed into the form it usually takes today, the "Christmas Panto," which involves some audience participation, often of children. Also used in the sense of "to enact silently," or mime (see dumb-show).

Parable

A short story told to illustrate a moral principle. It differs from allegory in being shorter and simpler: parables do not generally function on two levels simultaneously.

Parody

A comic play or other work in which an institution, phenomenon, person, or artistic genre is ridiculed, usually through exaggeration, debasement, substitution, and incongruity. Unlike burlesque, which tends to target a specific work and imitate its tone, style, or oddities perfectly and even affectionately, parody is loose, general, and critical.

Passion Play

A type of late medieval religious drama based on episodes from the life of Christ as related in the New Testament, similar to the saint's play or miracle play insofar as it dramatizes the persecution, suffering, and death of a martyr revered by Christians. Sometimes staged over many days, usually on an outdoor mansion set featuring Heaven on the left and a prominent and spectacularly equipped Hell Mouth on the right.

Pastoral Drama

A type of play invented during the Renaissance by members of Italian scholarly academies in an attempt to revive the satyr play of ancient Greece (see commedia erudita). Filtering the lusty, drunken goat-men, ecstatic maenads, and rustic settings of the satyr play though their Christian worldview, such writers created a new theatrical genre in which innocent shepherds, nymphs, and shepherdesses gambol in an idealized natural landscape free from the pressures of city life and the corruptions of civilization.

Personal Agency

The power, as exercised by an individual, to originate and carry out his or her desires from sources within the self, free from or against the determinism of external forces.

Playwright-in-Residence

A writer or creator of plays who is engaged by a theatre company to work within their midst for a period of time, either for the purpose of nurturing a young talent, or of gaining prestige from association with an established writer, and usually in the hope that he or she will produce new work for the company to perform.

Plot

Not to be confused with the "story," the plot of a play or other literary work is the precise arrangement of incidents used to tell the story. The same story can give rise to countless plots, depending on the point at which the writer chooses to begin (at Oedipus's birth? or on the last day of his reign?), what he or she chooses to dramatize (the wedding night of Oedipus and Jocasta? the murder of Hamlet's father?), and how he chooses to bring the events about (a messenger? a lost letter? an epiphany? a gun-battle?).

Poetic Prose Dramas

Plays that employ symbolism, metaphor, and heightened language to a degree normally associated with poetry, but that are written in prose rather than verse.

Postmodernism

A movement in art and culture during the last quarter of the twentieth century named for its rejection of modernism. Characterized by its re-embrace of tradition, postmodern art incorporates styles and conventions from previous historical periods, usually in eclectic combinations that reveal new aspects of each one. Noted for its playfulness and ironic detachment (see irony), postmodernism has been accused of lacking political seriousness; but its tendency to bring different media, periods, and cultural values into contact with one another (Western and Eastern theatre traditions, puppets and live actors, classical sculptures and computers, etc.) suggests that it is committed to seeing the world "globally" and resisting the domination of imagery and ideas by any one group or ideology.

Proagon

Greek for "pre-contest." It refers to the point in the Athenian theatre festivals at which playwrights appeared before the public with their actors to advertise their upcoming play, functioning like the "trailer" of contemporary movies in generating audience interest. At first performed outdoors, such events came to be held in the Odeon, or music-hall. See ag¯on.

Proscenium

A Latin architectural term derived from the Greek proskenion, the front-most section of the theatre building (sk¯en¯e) as it developed in the post-Classical, Hellenistic period. During the Renaissance, when theatres were built indoors, artificial lighting, perspective painting, and changeable scenery were adopted in scenography. To hide the scene-shifting equipment and lighting instruments from view of the spectators, a single archway was constructed at the front of the acting area. (The first proscenium of this type was built for the Teatro Farnese in 1618.) Stages on which a pictorial illusion is created with the help of a three- or four-sided border or frame are called "proscenium arch," or "picture-frame" theatres, and they reached their heyday during the nineteenth century, the age of realism.

Protagonist

The central character in a drama or other literary work; see ag¯on.


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