Dramatic techniques are used in multiple ways by play-writes and are used to convey different angles of the story, whether it's lighting patterns used to follow the dialog or music to show the play's mood. Dramatic techniques are valuable tools that enable the play-write conjure up a fake reality, but believable enough for the audience to accept it. It can also include irony, foreshadowing, imagery and contrast to name some examples. .
These two plays are cantered on lower income families in urban settings. Each story has one main dreamer with other characters being in various states of reality. Amanda Wingfield and Willy Loman are both living on pipe dreams. Amanda dreams of her days on the front porch surrounded by gentleman callers. Willy is the all time king of pipe dreams bouncing from past to future with imagining how everything would have been different if he had gone to Alaska (or Africa) with his brother Ben or will be different when Howard makes him showroom salesman at the home office or Biff gets ten (fifteen) thousand dollars for his new business idea.
Irony is important and even deserves its own category dramatic irony, which Dictionary.com defines asThe dramatic effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity.? One of the most obvious uses of dramatic irony in The Glass Menagerie is when Amanda tries to get Tom to eat and to promise that he will not become a drunkard. What is so ironic about this is that Thomas is horribly hung over from drinking just a few hours ago. .
As well as using dramatic irony, contrast can easily be found in Death of a salesman. Miller uses most of his characters to contrast the difference between success and failure. Willy has his head in the clouds and whose imagination is more extravagant than his sales ability, while Willy's wife, Linda, stands by her husband even in his absence of realism.
