Dramatis personae

(The Devil enters like a sapphire wasp That flickers mica wings. He lifts a hand To brush away a disrespectful smile. Job’s wife sits up.) Job’s Wife ➢ Well, if we aren’t all here. Including me, the only Dramatis Personae needed to enact the problem.

Instead of a dramatis personae of species, The Dinosaurs uses its beasts to illustrate climate, daily life, movement, danger, even extinction. So we meet nesting hydrosaurs, a singing pair of parasaurolophi, a herd of treetop-browsing brontosaurs.

Marx created a narrative populated by workers, capitalists, officials and scientists who were history’s dramatis personae.

Meanwhile, the other two main actors, Richard Dreyfuss as boyish ichthyologist Hooper and Robert Shaw as grizzled shark-hunter Quint, further added to the deepening of the dramatis personae by the paradoxical boon that they loathed each other.