Being “theatrical” means summing up plot or character with a single gesture so that the audience can take it in and move on. That happens throughout Broadway musicals and is epitomized by Bert Lahr saying that a doctor’s office sketch should not begin with a long exposition of the motivations for being there but with the simple line “Here we are in the doctor's office”. The price of such brevity is that there is no development through dialogue and action of the mood and the circumstances that justify the situation that is to be unfolded through subsequent dialogue and activity. Irving Thalberg is supposed to have told a screenwriter that you don’t need ten pages of dialogue to establish that a man and his wife are not getting along; just show her giving him a glare when he gives a look at a pretty young woman getting out of an elevator the three of them have shared. Thalberg was praising theatricality but that doesn’t do justice to the drama of a situation, where there is an explanation of how people became embedded in their situations, that regarded as something of significant interest, that ten pages of dialogue about a couple on the rocks telling something about this particular relationship and about such relationships in general. Drama has to do with an appreciation of the nature of a conflict while theatricality simply reveals and maybe not very well that the conflict exists. I am thinking of the original production of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” on Broadway in the Fifties. The first act opens with a woman in a slip ironing her boyfriend's shirt. The second act opens with a new girlfriend also standing in her slip at the ironing board. The audience laughed. They got the joke and the revelation that the girlfriend got treated the same way whomever she was. That was the heart of the drama and it was offered up with great theatricality.