TY - JOUR
AU1 - Fuchs, Elinor
AB -  The following walk through dramatic structure is a teaching tool. For the past several years I have used it at the Yale School of Drama as an entry to Reading Theater, a critical writing course for students in the MFA Dramaturgy Program. The “Questions” below are in part designed to forestall the immediate (and crippling) leap to character and normative psychology that underwrites much dramatic criticism. Aside from that corrective bias, the approach offered here is not a “system” intended to replace other approaches to play analysis; I often use it together with Aristotle’s unparalleled insight into plot structure. Rather, it could be thought of as a template for the critical imagination. In a fine article on Hedda Gabler, Philip E. Larson described the nature of “a genuine performance criticism.” If criticism “is unwilling to rest content with the evaluation of ephemera,” he wrote, “[it] must attempt to describe a potential object, one that neither the dramatist, the critics, nor the reader has ever seen, or will see.”1 These “Questions” are intended to light up some of the dark matter in dramatic worlds, to illuminate the potentialities Larson points to. No matter what answers come, the very act 
TI - EF's Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play
JF - Theater
DO - 10.1215/01610775-34-2-5
DA - 2004-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/duke-university-press/ef-s-visit-to-a-small-planet-some-questions-to-ask-a-play-MUHfnpsdgo
SP - 5
VL - 34
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -