Discussion topic
think about the experiences you've had with dramatic texts, including seeing live performances or film adaptations. how does the era in which a play was written affect your ability to enjoy it or understand it? how is it different to read or see a play written more than two millennia ago (such as tragedies and comedies from ancient greece) compared to a few centuries ago (for example, shakespeare or others from the renaissance) or one produced in the last 100 years?
is there something like a modern sensibility to more recently written dramatic works that you connect better to them than to works from past centuries? are there traits in older forms of drama that engage you because they are not modern? describe the traits of drama that keep you engaged as well as characteristics that make it challenging to do so.

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant