Realism, Naturalism, Absurdism, and Surrealism

Realism
Realism has:
       Believable characters.
       Authentic costumes that fit the characters and locations.
       We (both as an audience and as actors) are more used to realism, because realism had a major influence on western plays and movies.
       The stage (or set) is often believable.

Note: The word believable is used within the confines of the play, there could be elements of magic, or something else, but if the characters believe it and the world seems real then the word believable fits.

Most of our performances that we do/have done are in the realistic style, we seem to be wired to think in this way, it being very hard for us (as we have shown in class) to adjust anything to be (for example) Absurdist.

Naturalism
Naturalism is more realistic than realism.
The characters are often lower class, as opposed to the middle class of realism.
Stage time generally equals real time, so a three hour show would be three hours in the world of the play, but the absolute maximum time would be a day.
Costume, sets, and props are very thought out, attempting to be perfect for the time period of the performance.
Generally Happens in one place, however it could still be a main place, for example inside a house, and just outside the front door.
Often the characters are "victims of their circumstance".
There can be Taboos explored, for example suicide or prostitution

Absurdism
Absurdist plays often seem to have no plot, that is not to say they have none, what happens is the plot, however the plot does not follow the usual style.
Absurdism has pauses, where as a normal play, if a waiter is called then they would come, however in an Absurdist play, if the waiter is called there could be a delay between the words being said and the waiter coming, that is not to say that either the waiter will not come immediately, or even not come at all.

In class today we performed an Absurdist piece, we turned a coffee-shop scene that we had developed last lesson and turned in to the absurd.  We first came up with an idea, which we quickly replaced with a convention that we wanted to test, to turn on it's head.  I found this first part to be among the hardest, not only did we have to come up with quick instantaneous ideas, which I am not good at doing, but they had to be absurd.  We then changed our scene to fit the convention we were testing (it was that Children are not usually allowed in public alone, usually it is just adults alone).  After we had accommodated to that the plot of the scene proceeded to become weirded and weirded untill it was almost hard to see how we had got there from a coffee-shop.  I found that I do not like absurdism, in the sense that it is (for me) harder to perform, devise and understand, the latter of these I quite like when I have to do a performance.