act - a major division of a play.

Antagonist - A character or force against which another character struggles.

Aside - Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not "heard" by the other characters on stage during a play.

Catastrophe - The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play..

catharsis - Aristotle’s term for the purgation or purification of the pity and terror supposedly experienced while witnessing a tragedy.

Character - An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change).

Characterization - The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions.

Climax - The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.

comedy - a literary work, especially a play, characterized by humor and by a happy ending.

Comic relief - The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments.

conflict - a struggle between a character and some obstacle or between internal forces, such as divided loyalties.

crisis - a high point in the conflict that leads to the turning point.

dénouement - the resolution or the outcome (literally, the "unknotting") of a plot.

Deus ex machina - A god who resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention. The Latin phrase means, literally, "a god from the machine." The phrase refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play.

Dialogue - The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.

Dramatic Irony - a situation that depends on the audience's knowing something that a character has not realized, or on one character's knowing something other characters do not know

exposition - a setting-forth of information. In fiction and drama, introductory material introducing characters and the situation.

Falling action - In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution.

farce - comedy based not on clever language or on subtleties of characters but on broadly humorous situations.

Fourth wall - The imaginary wall of the box theater setting, supposedly removed to allow the audience to see the action.

Monologue - A speech by a single character without another character's response. See Dramatic monologue and Soliloquy.

peripeteia - a reversal in the action.

plot - the episodes in a narrative or dramatic work - that is, what happens - or the particular arrangement (sequence) of these episodes.

Props - Articles or objects that appear on stage during a play.

protagonist - the chief actor in any literary work. The term is usually preferable to hero and heroine because it can include characters - for example, villainous or weak ones - who are not aptly called heroes or heroines.

Rising action - A set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up to the climax. See Climax, Denouement, and Plot.

scene - a unit of a play, in which the setting is unchanged and the time continuous.

Setting - The time and place of a literary work that establish its context.

soliloquy - a speech in a play, in which a character alone on the stage speaks his or her thoughts aloud.

Stage direction - A playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (and actors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play.

Staging - The spectacle a play presents in performance, including the position of actors on stage, the scenic background, the props and costumes, and the lighting and sound effects.

tragedy - a serious play showing the protagonist moving from good fortune to bad and ending in death or a deathlike state.

Unities - The idea that a play should be limited to a specific time, place, and story line. The events of the plot should occur within a twenty-four hour period, should occur within a give geographic locale, and should tell a single story.