CONTEMPORARY PLAYS

Contemporary Play: Distinctive Characteristics and Features

Contemporary Play: Distinctive Characteristics and Features

Introduction

Most often, the plays are categorized depending on the genre from which they belong. The most common categories include drama, historical drama and comedy (eHow, 1999). Contemporary and moderns plays are categorized not depending on their genre, but depending on the period during which these plays were written. The plays written during the period late nineteenth to early twentieth century are considered as modern plays, while those which were written during the period starting from mid twentieth century and till the recent years are called contemporary plays. This essay describes the distinctive features and characteristics of contemporary plays, which include realism, naturalism and symbolism. Two contemporary plays “No Romance” and “Red Velvet” are discussed as examples of contemporary plays, and their settings and characteristics are discussed.

The contemporary play “No Romance “is written by Nancy Harris in 2012. The play focused on the problems people have in their relationships in the Modern Irish settings (Keane, 2013). According to the author herself in an interview: “the play is about loneliness, about death and about the people who could not communicate with each other and could not share secrets at really authentic level” (Keane, 2013). The play consists of three scenes and all share the common theme that despite of having advanced communication mechanisms available, people still hide themselves and the relationships become more complex as compared to the past. In all the scenes, the characters can be seen to struggle with their relationships. Thus, it can be said that this play manly focus on the social or communication issues of the modern world.

The other play used as an example for this paper is “Red Velvet” written by Lolita Chakrabarti in 2012. The play presents a powerful comparison between the today's society and the society of Othello which was written by Shakespeare in 1830. The theater is presented as a source of conservatism as well as of social progress. This play highlights the social as well as the political issues which the actors and other people related to the theater have to face, if they belong from a racial minority. The character of Ira is used as a symbol of all the people who work in theaters as social minorities, and face difficulties due to the opposition of other racial groups.

Discussion

The plays which have been written from the period of mid twentieth century to the date are called contemporary plays. Like the modern plays, this genre of plays also has some features with the help of which these are differentiated from the earlier genre. Some of the distinctive features of contemporary plays are discussed in the following:

Distinctive Characteristics and Features

Realism

Among the early writers of contemporary plays, the realism remained significantly popular and the characteristic can be easily found in the plays of today. In fact, realism has been one of the major characteristics of the plays over the period of last 120 years (Jones, ...