Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Chapter
2
What Is a Play?
© Robbie Jack/Historical/Corbis
A PLAY IS, ESSENTIALLY, WHAT HAPPENS in theatre.
A play is not a thing but an event. But not just any
event: rock concerts, stand-up comedy, poetry readings,
storytelling, and cabaret performances all occur
onstage in a highly theatrical manner, but they are not
plays. Why not? What makes a play a play?
To answer that question, we can look at a related
word, drama, whose origin is from the Greek dran,
“something done.” Simply put, a play supplies the
theatre with drama. The word theatron, we remember,
means “seeing place.” So we can put these terms
together to learn that a play is both done (it supplies
drama) and communally witnessed (it is theatrical). A
play, then, is a form of perceived action, not just words
in a book.
This definition of a play goes all the way back to
the Greek thinker Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), who wrote
one of the first and finest works about the theatre, the
Poetics. A play, Aristotle observed, is an “imitation
of an action.” This kind of action, however, is not the
kind we think of today—it is not merely movement.
It encompasses argument, struggle, persuasion, terror,
seduction, sound, music, dance, speech, and passion.
We might think of this understanding of “action” as
any form of energy: language, spatial dynamics, light,
color, sonic shocks, harmonies, and, in general, events
that are remarkable, in the truest sense of the word—
we observe, remark, and think about them.
Yet a play does not merely produce (or reproduce)
live action—otherwise, why would we go to the theatre,
rather than just look out our windows? Drama
takes the raw material of life—pure action—and frames
and focuses it around a particular conflict that lends it
meaning and significance. Drama gives us structure
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