Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

24 Chapter 2 What Is a Play?
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is often considered the American theatre’s finest tragedy, since its protagonist, the
likeable but morally flawed Willy Loman, experiences a decline of fortune that eventually leads to his suicide. Here, in
a dream sequence from the much-heralded 1999 Goodman Theatre production, Brian Dennehy as Willy (center) leans
on the shoulders of his two sons (played by Kevin Anderson and Ted Koch), not as they are now but as he remembers
them from better days. © Charles Osgood
Stagecraft
Genre-ly Speaking
Shakespeare often has brightly parodied the division of
plays into genres, a practice that in his time was already
becoming almost an affectation. In Hamlet, Polonius
describes an acting company as “The best actors in
the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral,
pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or
poem unlimited.”
Is Miller’s play a tragedy? Ultimately, you, the audience,
must decide. The classification of plays into genres
is not a science but a matter of opinion. Even Shakespeare
made fun of scholars who treated genres as absolute categories
to be applied to each and every work. The fact is
that genres are mainly important to play producers and
publishers who want to let the public know what sort of
drama they are being asked to attend or read. The editors
of the first edition (the First Folio) of Shakespeare’s
complete dramatic works divided them into tragedies,
comedies, and histories. The last category refers to plays
about England’s kings that were more or less based on
historical accounts. But some of those “histories” could
be construed as tragedies—and vice versa—and some
of the comedies include scenes as tragic as anything in
Shakespeare’s (or the world’s) dramatic repertoire.
Comedy is a very popular genre and has been a staple
of the theatre since ancient times. Playwrights of all eras
have written comedies—sometimes with serious themes,
sometimes with particularly dark humor. At yet other
times playwrights have no purpose other than to create