Final answer:
Dialogue in a play is used to reveal the backstory and exposition, helping the audience grasp the narrative and characters' motivations. It's an essential aspect often intertwined with dialogue to convey past events and secrets that influence the story's present.
Step-by-step explanation:
The dialogue in a play serves to reveal the backstory, which includes events that have occurred before the play starts. This exposition is critical for the audience to understand the narrative and the motivation of the characters. Characters share their histories and relationships through their lines, influencing how they perceive the world and interact with each other. Playwrights often begin a play at a point of attack, where the plot unfolds from a particular moment. This may not always be the beginning of the characters' stories, as significant occurrences that contribute to the play's conflict could have happened previously.
An initial event, or an inciting incident, disrupts the routine and drives the narrative forward. In plays like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the longstanding feud between two families serves as an inciting incident that significantly influences the plot, although this event precedes the play's starting point. Through dialogue, secrets and past details are woven into the current events, providing depth to the play and assisting the audience in understanding the source of the conflicts faced by the characters.