Supporting Characters: The Meat And Potatoes Of A Good Play

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Supporting Characters: The Meat and Potatoes of a Good Play

In every play, story, book, and movie, you’ve always got a few main things that are always the same. One is that you always have some sort of flowing story involved that tells the reader, watcher, etc. something. The second is that you have main characters to convey this story and all the emotions intertwined to the audience, whatever the medium may be. We all seem to forget though, that there is much more to the story than what the main characters do. Without a supporting cast of characters, no story would ever be as good as it was with them. Imagine Othello without Iago. Imagine Frodo without Sam. I shudder to think of a world where Luke doesn’t have Han Solo by his side! All kidding aside, supporting characters are what make stories great and memorable, and these three plays prove that amazingly.

Oedipus Rex, what a sad poor man. But he himself wasn’t really all that deep or memorable of a character. Yes the story revolved around him, but it never made him into a hero or anything better than a common man. Why then, is this story still being told today, thousands of years after it was initially penned? The reason is the complexity surrounding the supporting cast, and although many of their parts only last for one scene or in some cases even just a few lines, the story would never be told without them. Imagine if you will, the scene with the blind sage telling the King about his past, present and future. He has only a brief time in the story, but without him the story falls apart and becomes meaningless. Even if he had gotten that information a different way, lets say from reading a book or a diary, or some fanciful show from the gods, it would never have as much impact as it did from Tiresias. The blind leading the blind, I guess you could say.

In Antigone, we again follow the bloodline of Oedipus, through his daughters and sons. Again though, you ...