For Play Script Readers
“When it comes to a written script, potential production teams are readers before they are theater makers. Or are they? I contend that readers of play scripts are always participating in some form of theater making. Even without embodied performance, we know that people think with their bodies through the lines.”
Bess Rowen, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment
What do we create when we read?
Because reading is, in fact, a kind of creation. Most production teams read a play script before picking it for a season, and many actors read through plays for audition materials. There are also lay readers who never intend to produce the plays they read, whether those readers are students in a course or someone reading for pleasure. Although we constantly make meaning while we read, we do not all agree on what plays mean. This is the fun of theatre, and indeed of all art! So, what are some things to keep in mind as you read plays?
So, what are some things to keep in mind as you read plays?
Read with your whole body.
Although dialogue is obviously important, most plays are not composed of words without any physicality. The characters on the page are alive when they are in your head and on stage. Are you playing one of them as you read? Or are you watching them interact with each other? How would these characters strike you if you met them in person? What is their energy like? Affective stage directions specialize in this kind of information! Let them move your body as you read!
Read for the theater, but also for the world.
Sometimes the affective stage directions tell you how to stage the play, other times they focus on how the action would play out in a world uninhibited by theatrical limitations. Regardless of which kind of play you’re reading, it’s helpful to keep those parallel tracks in mind as you go. How would you stage this play? How would this play look in a world where nothing is impossible? How do those two tracks inform each other?
Read and reread.
Reading a play for the first time, especially a play you have not encountered on stage, is an introduction to a new world (or, as Elinor Fuchs puts it, a new planet). But affective stage directions, and the plays that contain them, are meant to adapt to new circumstances. This means that rereading a set of affective stage directions, and the play that contains them, could result in a radically different experience for you. What does the difference in your response to those same words on the page say about the play, you, and the nature of nonverbal performance? The answer to this question is what keeps me returning to see the same plays over and over again for the lines in between the lines.