TASC Drama flashcards
TASC Drama · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Dramatic irony
- A gap between what the audience understands and what a character knows, creating tension or humor as the character acts on incomplete information.
- Soliloquy
- A speech delivered by a character alone on stage that reveals private thoughts to the audience rather than to other characters.
- Aside
- A short remark spoken by a character that other characters on stage supposedly cannot hear, giving the audience insider information.
- Monologue
- An extended uninterrupted speech by one character while others remain present and may react, unlike a soliloquy delivered alone.
- Hamartia
- The fatal flaw or error in judgment that leads a tragic protagonist toward downfall, often tied to pride or excess.
- Climax
- The moment of greatest tension in a play, where the central conflict reaches its turning point and later events become inevitable.
- Exposition
- The opening portion of a play that establishes setting, characters, prior events, and the situation from which conflict will grow.
- Inciting incident
- The event that disrupts the status quo and sets the protagonist's central objective in motion, launching the rising action.
- Foil
- A character whose traits contrast with another's, making the protagonist's qualities more visible through comparison rather than direct statement.
- Protagonist
- The central character whose objective drives the plot and whose choices the audience follows most closely.
- Antagonist
- The force or character that obstructs the protagonist's objective, which may be a person, a society, or an internal impulse.
- Stage directions
- Scripted instructions describing movement, setting, lighting, sound, and delivery; they are read but never spoken aloud in performance.
- Subtext
- The meaning beneath a character's spoken words, revealed through hesitation, contradiction, or repetition rather than explicit statement.
- Fourth wall
- The imagined boundary between performers and audience; breaking it means direct address or interaction with the spectators.
- Upstage and downstage
- Positions on stage relative to the audience: upstage is farther away, downstage is closer, named from the historical raked stage.
- Stage left and right
- Directions determined from the actor's perspective facing the audience, so stage left appears on the audience's right.
- Blocking
- The planned movement and positioning of actors on stage, set by the director and recorded by the stage manager for consistency.
- Cue
- A signal for a line, light shift, sound effect, or entrance, called by the stage manager during performance to keep timing synchronized.
- Stage manager
- The production role that runs rehearsals, records blocking, calls cues, and coordinates communication among cast and crew.
- Dramaturg
- A production role focused on script research, historical context, translation, and advising the director on textual interpretation.
- Producer
- The role responsible for financing, budgeting, marketing, venue arrangements, and overall business management of a production.
- Director
- The artist who shapes a unified interpretation of the script through casting, blocking, pacing, and coordination of design elements.
- Tragedy
- A genre tracing a protagonist's serious downfall, typically ending in suffering or death and evoking pity and fear in the audience.
- Comedy
- A genre moving from confusion toward resolution, often ending in marriage, reunion, or restored order and relying on wit and mishap.
- Farce
- A comedy of exaggerated situations, physical humor, rapid entrances, and improbable coincidences rather than character depth.
- Melodrama
- A heightened genre with clear villains and sympathetic victims, emphasizing emotional spectacle and moral contrast over subtlety.
- Absurdist drama
- A nonrealistic style using circular dialogue, illogical events, and minimal plot to suggest meaninglessness or human isolation.
- Realism
- A style aiming for believable everyday speech, plausible settings, and psychologically consistent characters rather than stylized convention.
- Fourth-wall realism
- A staging approach where characters behave as if no audience exists, with sets and lighting imitating an actual room.
- Theme
- An arguable idea about human experience that a play explores; it is stated as a full sentence, not a single word.
- Tone versus mood
- Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject; mood is the emotional feeling produced in the audience by the whole production.
- Projection and articulation
- Projection is voice volume sufficient to fill the space; articulation is crisp formation of sounds so words stay intelligible.