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The set helps show where and when the story of a play takes place. The way the set is laid out can also convey meaning to the audience. The most important part of set design is to show the audience where the action takes place, important themes and symbols. The set also needs to convey what period of time the play is taking place in. For example, a futuristic bedroom in 2090:

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The elements of a drama | Reading | Khan Academy

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Stage directions use these basic directions to tell the actor where to move on the stage. They are always given from the actors perspective. Upstage being towards the back of the auditorium and downstage towards the audience. Left and right corresponding to the actor looking out at the audience.

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Many playwrights provide detailed information about what the stage should look like before the action of the play, and will provide updates on how the stage should change throughout the play. This is always in italics. See the example below from Master Harold... and the Boys.

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Whether its a play, musical, or performance art piece, the stage has many aspects that need light to bring it to life. Lights help to focus the audience on a specific spot, or help to set the mood by changing the brightness, colour, or density.

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Since there is no narrator, the playwright relies on dialogue to:
- develop character
- establish relationships between characters
- provide background information
- advance the plot

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Props are crucial to compliment the actor look more "the part" as well as setting the scene. The props can sometimes become a huge focus in a production too, like the DeLorean from Back To The Future. Props give the audience subconscious clues about the character, the scene or situation, helping a story come to life and drawing you into the scene to create immersion.

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A line of dialogue begins with the character's name in capitals. This is followed by a colon, and then the words to be spoken without any quotation marks. Sometimes, the playwright will indicate how a line is supposed to be delivered [in square brackets and italics].

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The playwright uses divisions within a play to help the audience recognize a change in time or location.

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Costumes help tell the story, they help actors get into character, and they immediately tell the audience what’s going on. Costumes can also give information on the tone and style of a play. They may look just like what we wear today, or they may look like what people wore at the time in which the play is set.

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Costume Design: The Hidden Layer of Movie Magic

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Whether its the dramatic makeup of a horror film or the unique makeup in Cirque du Soleil, makeup plays an important part in establishing the characterization and impact of a performed role. Stage makeup is usually used to create characters, heighten facial features, and compensate for the effects of stage lighting.

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A one-act play must have the following characteristics and components:

The story must revolve around, or focus on one event.

The action of the play should move fairly quickly. There is no time to have a lengthy introduction. Introduce characters and conflict fairly early on in the action of the play.

The conflict should be clear to the audience. It should be resolved by the end of the play.

The characters should be limited to two to seven, with one clear main character.

Make your characters believable, but interesting!

Create a setting that is realistic in regards to the characters and plot. The setting can be very detailed or discussed minimally, always in italics.

There must be a meaningful theme. The audience must walk away from the play having learned a lesson about life and/or experienced real emotions.

The playing time or read-through time of the play should be between twenty and sixty minutes.

The play should be entertaining and engaging, with some element of suspense.

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Music in plays can help to show the emotions being felt by the characters and influence the audience's emotions as well. The music used in a play is different from most music as it is used to enhance or support the rest of the aspects of the play. Music in a play can also help assist in telling the story through the tone of the song or even lyrics acting as part of the script. Furthermore, music can help to build tension or set the scene for a production. Music can also help to set the time period the play is in by using music from that time or that uses elements that were common in music then. Music can also help the audience feel emersed in the performance and it can help in building up the correct atmosphere.

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Without the music this scene would lose much of the impact that it has.

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The Magic Flute – Queen of the Night aria (Mozart; Diana Damrau, The Royal Opera)

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Sound effects are used to help make the scenes feel more natural, even though you wouldn’t be able to hear the action. Sound effects also help to set the atmosphere and can impact the emotions of the scene. Sound effects can also indicate the actions that are happening in a scene. Without sound effects a play would seem unnatural, and it would take the viewer out of the scene.

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The importance of sound efffect are demonstrated well with this film trailer that lacks sound effects.

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The Mummy Trailer without music or sound effects

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Silence in a play can build suspense and create tension in the audience. It can also set the mood or influence the emotion of the scene. It draws the audience in and makes them focus on the scene. It can also help to create contrast between the noise in other parts of a play.

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I love the sound of silence in the theatre. I don't mean the anxious silence you get when an actor forgets his or her lines, and the audience holds its breath like passengers on a stricken aircraft. Or even the Pinteresque pause, a device now often overused and overrated. No, it's that moment after a truly brilliant performance when the audience remains sated and unmoving, as if willing the spell to remain unbroken for a little longer. This kind of silence fills an extra beat before thunderous applause erupts.

Sometimes I feel as if I could cheerfully murder the people (almost always connected with the production in some way) who clap too swiftly, and thus, fumbling to be first with applause, break the spell. (They're probably the same people who laugh too loudly at every joke on press nights, blithely unaware that they are killing the comedy, not helping it.) In a theatre culture in which the standing ovation has lost all meaning because of its ubiquity, the silent moment before the curtain call is increasingly the sign of an audience gathered into the palm of a play's hand. In Liverpool last month, the first-night audience at Jonathan Harvey's Canary took a collective breath before they cheered, but the best example I can think of this year was TR Warszawa's harrowing production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, which came to the Barbican in March after appearing in Edinburgh a few years back. It dispensed with any curtain call for the actors at all, leaving us lost in shadows as the lights slowly rose - gentle encouragement for the witnesses to rejoin the living.

But the silence I really love is that rare silence that comes right in the middle of a play, and which is so still it feels as if the air itself might snap in two. It doesn't happen often, but I've recently been lucky enough to experience it twice in less than a week: once in Simon Godwin's revival (sharper, I think, than Stephen Daldry's original Royal Court production) of Caryl Churchill's devastating Far Away at Bristol Old Vic, and a few days previously during A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky at the Lyric. I can see why the reflective nature of the latter may not be to everyone's taste - although its raw open heart made me weep, once in the theatre and again on the way home. But there was one scene during which it felt as if the entire audience was holding its breath: the extraordinary moment when an elderly mother washes - in real time - a dying son's cancer-ravaged body. Nothing much is happening, and yet the audience is entirely gripped; it feels like a sacred moment.

I've noticed that there often seems to be a connection between these kinds of moments and actions played out in real time. I still recall the electric shock in the audience during Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare (now that's a play in need of a revival) at the Bush 15 years ago, when an elderly woman, untouched by her husband for 40 years after her flesh was hideously burned in a fire, is caressed by a servant whose fingers work his way slowly up her body. At the same venue, I once sat among an audience rapt in silent concentration as an actor rolled a number of barrels on to the stage during Kroetz's The Nest. Each one seemed to take a lifetime, and the tension was unbearable: it felt as if the entire audience was leaning so far forward we might just topple off our seats.

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Silence that speaks volumes in the theatre | Lyn Gardner

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I love the sound of silence in the theatre. I don't mean the anxious silence you get when an actor forgets his or her lines, and the audience holds its breath like passengers on a stricken aircraft. Or even the Pinteresque pause, a device now often overused and overrated.

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“Silence at the start of a performance can set the required tone or mood from the outset. Silence draws the audience in, resulting in a tightly focused image of a sole actor. Add stage lighting and the visual picture can be impressive.”

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Here I am making a post in a busy (and noisy) junior technology class. Just like in Drama, my students are having fun. But (perhaps unfortunately) many of them associate enjoyment with noise.

A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting article quoting a Hollywood film director complaining that too many of our movies today are simply full of noise. One may only have to watch The Bourne Ultimatum to be convinced. I just threw in the DVD of this fantastic movie, closed my eyes and laid back and listened to 10 minutes of ... you guessed it ...noise ... and loud, continuous noise, at that.

This all got me thinking of the value of silence ... in drama, of course. Silence is often forgotten in student performances, but when used wisely, its effects can be profound.

When performing solo performances or monologues, in particular, I often encourage many of my students to begin with silence (not to be confused with the silence of getting into character, I mean the first 15 or 20 seconds of the performance, itself). Silence at the start of a performance can set the required tone or mood from the outset. Silence draws the audience in, resulting in a tightly focused image of a sole actor. Add stage lighting and the visual picture can be impressive.

Often accompanying silence in performance is stillness. These two elements sometimes go hand in hand and complement each other. Stillness and silence can create effective dramatic tension in performance. The silence can be continued just long enough to increase the tension, but if you draw it out too long your intentions may fail. Like stretching a rubber band until the second before it breaks, stillness and silence in performance need to be carefully calculated to create the required mood and tension.

Of course, silence does not necessarily need to occur at the beginning of the drama. It can be anywhere the actor or director wants it. Stillness and silence occurring suddenly, or soon after scenes full of activity and noise, can result in effective contrast in performance. It is this example of light and shade that can turn good drama into great drama.

We all love it when a moment of silence is so "loud" in performance, you can hear a pin drop in the house. These are moments of magic when the audience is entirely focused on the stage action, completely immersed in the events occurring before them.

Last week my Year 12 Drama students performed an evening of 7-minute solo character performances at school for parents and friends. While everyone may well remember the hilarity and laughter resulting from the more comic performances on the program, as their Drama teacher, it was those few moments of deliberate stillness and silence in the more serious performances that I remembered most.

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The Value of Silence | The Drama Teacher

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Here I am making a post in a busy (and noisy) junior technology class. Just like in Drama, my students are having fun. But (perhaps unfortunately) many of them associate enjoyment with noise. A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting article quoting a Hollywood film director complaining that...