Talking to the audience: Narrative characters in twentieth-century drama.

摘要

In modern drama, the story is usually presented through action and dialogue, not using the narration employed in non-dramatic prose. Yet Western drama as we know it began with the Greeks, who used the chorus to perform such narrative functions as introducing the action, placing the action in context, and revealing past or off-stage events. Shakespeare often used characters specifically named as chorus and added the techniques of soliloquy and aside for narrative purposes.; With the advent of the twentieth century, characters who address the audience directly, or engage in lengthy soliloquies and asides, are the exception rather than the convention in plays. Nevertheless, some major twentieth-century playwrights have used such narrative characters and techniques. This researcher examines the playwrights' purposes and the narrative characters' motives in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, Peter Shaffer's Equus, Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, and Margaret Edson's Wit.