Act and Scene

An act is a major division in the action of a play. In England, this division was introduced by Elizabethan dramatists who imitated ancient Roman plays by structuring the action into five acts. Late in the nineteenth century, a number of writers followed the example of Chekhov and Ibsen by constructing plays in four acts. In the twentieth century, the most common form for traditional non-musical dramas has been three acts.

Acts are often subdivided into scenes, which in modern plays usually consist of units of action in which there is no change of place or break in the continuity of time. (Some more recent plays dispense with the division into acts and are structured as a sequence of scenes, or episodes.) In the conventional theatre with a proscenium arch that frames the front of the stage, the end of a scene is usually indicated by a dropped curtain or a dimming of the lights, and the end of an act by a dropped curtain and an intermission.