NYSTCE Theater 166 cheat sheet

Theater

• Theater content on NYSTCE 166 spans four competency areas: theatrical foundations (history, genres, dramatic literature), performance and production processes, theater in a cultural and social context, and theater pedagogy with assessment.

• Genre markers: tragedy traces a protagonist's reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis) toward a catastrophic outcome; comedy resolves toward social reconciliation; tragicomedy blends both; farce relies on improbable situations, stock types, and physical business.

• Aristotle's six elements of drama, in order of importance as he ranks them: plot (mythos), character, thought (dianoia), diction, music, and spectacle. Plot means the arrangement of incidents, not the story itself.

• The well-made play (Scribe, Sardou, later Ibsen) is built on exposition, a complicating incident, rising action with secrets and withheld information, a mandatory scene, and a climactic resolution or denouement.

• The proscenium arch frames a picture-plane stage; thrust stages project into the audience on three sides; arena/theater-in-the-round surrounds the stage on four sides; black box theaters are flexible, reconfigurable spaces.

• Stage geography is fixed from the actor's perspective facing the audience: downstage is toward the audience, upstage is away, stage right is the actor's right, and center stage is the midpoint. House left and house right are the opposite.

• Key theatrical periods and conventions: Greek amphitheater with masks and the chorus; Roman spectacle; medieval cycle and mystery plays on pageant wagons; commedia dell'arte with masked stock characters and lazzi; Elizabethan open-air public playhouses; neoclassical French tragedy under the unities; realism and naturalism in the late nineteenth century; epic theater (Brecht) with alienation effect; absurdism (Beckett, Ionesco) rejecting causal plot.

• The Stanislavski system centers on given circumstances, objectives and super-objective, emotion memory, the magic if, and through-line of action; later American Method variants (Strasberg, Adler, Meisner) emphasize affective memory, substitution, and repetition exercises respectively.

• Production roles: the director unifies concept and staging; the stage manager runs rehearsals and cues the show; the dramaturg researches text and context; the producer manages budget and logistics; designers handle set, costume, lighting, sound, and properties.