Different Genres of Plays

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Hi. My name is Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, and today I'll be talking to you about playwriting basics. Now, we're going to look at the different genres of theater. We'll so divide these in two categories. First, we'll look at the classical theater, and then we'll examine the modern theater. Classical theater, you have comedies and tragedies. Example of a comedy may be "As You Like It." It's a play about young lovers running into the woods and having a romantic adventures and misadventures. And then at the end, everyone gets married. There's a speech in "As You Like" It where Jaques has this long, philosophical monologue about life and death and how a man begins as an infant and then ends as an infant, and it is a pretty morbid speech, but in the end, everyone gets married so it's considered a comedy. Tragedies: Hamlet, perhaps. Hamlet is one of the best tragedies the world has ever known. It's a revenge story. At the end, everyone dies. It's very bleak. It's very sad. Hamlet accomplishes his goal, but at the end he dies so it's a tragedy. In the modern theater, comedies, dramas, and serial comedies. Comedies would be something like "Leather Shoes," "The Foreigner," where this guy comes in into this family and he's this foreigner, there are all kinds of crazy situations, a farce, a satire, a parody, where we've taken elements of the modern world, famous figures and make fun of them, poke fun on them. It's for humor. Everything is for the laugh. Drama might be the "Death of a Salesman," an Arthur Miller classic about a working man who is basically ignored by society and then the tragedy befalls him. And in a serial comedy might be like "Jake's Women," Neil Simon's play about a man who is dealing with his life, and his wives, and all the mistakes he's made and it has moments of humor, certainly, but it also has moments of poignant drama. And these are some of the genres that we will be examining in this course. Okay."