Dramaturgical Analysis Essay

Walk into a room with any number of people and you will fail to find a single person who is being their true self. This is what was proposed by Symbolic Interactionist Erving Goffman, who coined the term “dramaturgical analysis.” According to this theory, people assume different personas throughout the day depending on the circumstances, almost like an actor playing a role on stage:
“He said that when we are backstage, we relax and act like ourselves, but when we are front stage we use impression management. In other words, we call attention to certain aspects of our performance and we hide others. We might even misrepresent ourselves.”
The personas we most often assume are our “principal roles”, drawing, again, off theatre terminology. I would say that my principal roles are daughter; sister; student; granddaughter; and actor. The old saying is that no one is ever their true self until they are alone, and while I think this is true, I also think that everyone injects at least some level of realness into the roles they play in everyday life. I say this because in theatre, the best way to relate to and accurately portray a character is to develop a backstory for …show more content…
Role strain is when someone assumes a persona in everyday life that is overwhelming; therefore, they wind up underperforming. A good metaphor for this would be when an actor messes up their lines because they have so many to memorize that they forget some of them. In my life, I experience role strain in perhaps the most ironic way. Being an actor, I often volunteer myself for responsibilities on the stage that require much of my time and effort. Considering that this is my last year to perform with a certain theater, I have found that I am subjecting myself to more strain than ever. This is definitely not a good thing, but in an industry where your very best is simply not good enough anymore, it is necessary to go above and beyond, no matter what the