A play usually has one major plot. This is sometimes complicated by several minor plots. The plot is often recognized early or it may slowly untold.
The personal character traits are usually brought out early. This helps to keep each character distinct especially the main character. If a man flies into a temper when a servant makes a slight error, or keeps interrupting the conversation of other people, or is offensively boastly your audience will realize at once the sort of person he is.
Dialogue must be unusually clear and precise, It should correspond to the character; children don’t talk like adults or a policeman like a school teacher.
I have chosen two plays,
THE OXCART
by Rene Marques and
A RAISIN IN
THE SUN
by Lorraine Hansberry. I chose plays above epic novels because it is much easier to individualize characters in plays, especially for students who are slow or remedial learners. The elementary student as well as the junior high student enjoy dramatizations. To grasp the indepth understanding of a character becomes real. These two plays will not only give students a stimulating reading experience but an opportunity to draw their own conclusions and make decisions.
The families in these plays, although of two different cultures, feel that the ability to alleviate some of the difficulties they are experiencing was dependent on change, change they themselves could make. Just how realistic was this dream? To find reasonable happiness is what every human being wants. Does the romantic who functions on imagination and emotions have a chance to succeed? Or does the realist have the advantage, the one who has the disposition to see situations or difficulties in the light of facts and deal with them practically? Is the representation in literature and art as they are in life? This may or may not be. The idealist has the ability to see things as they should be rather than as they are.
Could this brighten our hope for the future? To believe that the family will one day come together as a loving unit and everyone doing their part will inevitably happen, is hope.
The knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out, that one can somehow handle and manage internal and eternal reality is hope, ones sense of the possible. “Hope always transcends the present moment. Hope looks to the next step, whatever form the step may take.”
3
Hope is then energized by belief in the possibility of getting somewhere or reaching goals. Steadier and more mature hope that is less subject to rise and fall develops as life moves on. Now it becomes possible to act on hope in an emergency and there is one last deep resource. This is a special gift.
