Play

The play (from French Pièce - work, excerpt, part ) - the specific name of the works of drama intended for performance from the stage, as well as for television and radio plays ^[1] .

The structure of the play includes the text of the characters - dialogues and monologues - and functional author’s remarks : notes containing a designation of the place of action, sometimes the features of the interior, the appearance of the characters, their behavior, etc. As a rule, the play is preceded by a list of characters , sometimes - indicating their age, profession, titles, family ties, etc.

A separate finished semantic part of the play is called an act or action, which may include smaller components - phenomena, episodes, pictures.

The very concept of the play is purely formal, it does not include any emotional or stylistic meaning. Therefore, in most cases, the play is accompanied by a subtitle that defines its genre - classical, main ( comedy , tragedy , drama ), or author, for example: “My poor Marat” by Alexei Arbuzov - “dialogues in three parts”; “Wait and See” by George Bernard Shaw - “a pleasant play in four acts”; " Good man from Sichuan " by Bertolt Brecht - "play-parabola", as well as William Shakespeare's drama "Hamlet" and others. The genre designation of the play not only serves as a “hint” to the director and actors in the stage interpretation of the play, but helps to enter into the author's style, the figurative system of drama. In the 20th century, the term “play” was also applied to lyric poems ^[2] . Drama began to be called plays only in the 20th century .

In musical art, the term piece is usually used as a specific name for instrumental music ^[1] .