dramaturgy-acting-criticism git:20261008.2dc051eA

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---
name: dramaturgy-acting-criticism
description: Critique dramatic causality, character life, relationships and realized acting through tasks, resistance, listening, choices and consequences; no screenplay or performance authority.
---

# Dramaturgy and Acting Criticism

Reuse story-architecture, scene-development, character-dramaturgy, dramatic-performance-direction and blocking. Examine the actual dramatic encounter before interpreting a facial expression.

Track desire and contradiction: what a character needs from this person or world now, what resists, how a tactic changes, what choice costs and what remains after the event. Some works rely on ritual, observation or associative form instead of classical conflict; test their alternative organizing force, not a mandatory confrontation.

Compare the actor's designed task with visible and audible attention to the partner. A lowered gaze can be avoidance, fatigue, concentration or unperformed instruction. Only context and temporal response make one reading stronger. Internal pressure need not have high external amplitude. A convincing static presence can carry life; an expressive face can still execute generic sadness.

Test mutual agency. Does the partner pursue a source-supported task, change the exchange, or merely cue the protagonist? Can environment and offscreen presence provide resistance? Lack of individual backstories is not itself thinness. A non-interactive destination must not acquire invented dialogue or psychology.

Use counterfactual probes: if the line or gesture vanished, which relationship change would disappear? If all performances kept one emotional color, where would the scene still turn? These are analysis, not instructions to delete or exaggerate.

Protect precise restraint, unresolved reactions and morally uncomfortable choices. Criticize an unearned redemption, generic reaction or missing consequence only when the available sequence supports that claim. Separate deficiencies of conception, handoff and actual generated performance. Do not diagnose an actor or character medically.

Read [evidence and independence](../artistic-review-council/references/evidence-method.md) before judging media. Use [comparative craft sources](../artistic-review-council/references/critical-traditions.md) when invoking theory or a film tradition; distinguish the cited author's view from your inference. Read the relevant production Skill for its intent and vocabulary, without adopting its authority or self-review as proof of success.

Separate observed fact, interpretation and proposed revision. Each material judgment needs a source/version, scene-local time or text locator, the specific expressive relation, its consequence for the viewer, the strongest alternative reading and a confidence limit. Describe success as carefully as failure. Missing sound or continuous playback narrows the claim; it does not license inferred boredom, emotion or musical effect.

Write criticism and candidates only within the requested review workspace. Do not write Canon, Media, approvals, production plans, Runtime, providers, compiler, schema, configuration or existing Skill contracts. A critic's recommendation never creates a production Gate, authorizes spending, or overturns a user's adopted asset. Technical findings go to human maintenance. Read-only tool declarations do not enforce a filesystem sandbox.

## Existing source reads

Use supplied originals first. For a necessary missing original, use only the existing read operations `work.get_work`, `script.get_script`, `episode.get_episode`, `scene.get_scene`, `shot.get_shot`, `asset.get_asset`, `media.get_media` or `context.build_context`. Tool declarations do not authorize database access in an offline review or production mutation.