IN WHAT has been noted above the emphasis has been on situa-
tions and the involvement they produce. This is generally
referred to as a plot. It has been considered the prime element in a
play ever since Aristotle's Poetics, and it is certainly of major im-
portance in theatre or production. Since production means putting a
play on the stage instead of merely reading it at home or from a plat-
form, the stress must be on making sure that the play unfolds itself as a
series of occurrences; otherwise the audience will become tired of
watching somebody simply standing about and being a person. (The
audience can easily make the assumption that a person is a person,--
but where does it go from there?)

However, we were careful to speak of situations and involvements
always with reference to character. It is a mistake to establish separate
categories of plot and characterization, although it is often attempted
purely as a convenience in treating the subject of drama. The dis-
tinction has been made by two camps--by the Aristotelians, who
stress plot because they consider the drama as basically a series of
actions, and by modernists like Galsworthy who, reacting against
the melodramatic implications of putting the plot first, give the palm
to character. Actually, the plot is never simply a series of situations
but the interplay of character and situation. In the theatre, there
would be no situation without characters, and no characters (in the
sense of people who establish themselves fully for an audience) with-
out situation--i.e., without the things they do or experience. Situa-
tions are what people do or experience; characterization, in the drama,
is what people reveal about themselves in what they do, what they
allow to happen to themselves, and how they react to other people

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