Drama imitates action.
Dramas usually tell stories; however, as opposed to narrative, dramas are written to be performed.
We tend to think of human actors performing dramas, but puppets, animated drawings, or any other figure convey plot and its conflicts via action or speech.
The play A Midsummer Night’s Dream finds itself in the dramatic genre, as does the cartoon South Park. Subgenres of drama include films, television series, and radio plays, which all flourished in the Twentieth Century when technology enabled the recording and broadcast of performances.
Since the primary quality of drama is the imitation of action, drama need not contain speech; silent films sit firmly in the dramatic genre.
Performance
Drama depends on the peculiarities of any given performance to generate a sense of immediacy between the work and the audience.
The same play performed by different companies will offer a different experience of the work, even if the text on the page does not change; Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Prince Hamlet, for example, is quite different from Laurence Olivier’s portrayal or Derek Jacobi’s portrayal of the same character.
The same play performed by the same company on different nights, furthermore, might offer a different experience as well: a different audience can elicit a different intensity of performance from the same group of actors.
Films, where the actors are not performing live, are also audience dependent. Seeing a comedy on a Friday night at a movie theater with a crowd who is laughing will be a very different experience than seeing the same film alone while streaming it at home.
Students reading a drama, therefore, should act it out or see a performance, preferably with an audience, in order to deepen their understanding of the work.
Click to read on about the ultimate genre, Poetry.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
William Shakespeare
