Reading+a+Play

Most plays are written not to be read in books but to be performed. True, plays are meant to be seen on stage, bu reading a play may afford advantages. Not everyone has the time nor the opportunity to see a production. Even if you have the resources, opportunities and selections available to you, there is no way for you to see ALL of the wonderful plays in existence. Therefore, reading a play will expose you to the story and masterpiece while allowing for imagination and innovation on your part. A play is literature before it comes alive in a theater, and it might be argued that when we read an unfamiliar play, we meet it in the same form in which it first appears to its actors and its director. If a play is rich and complex or if it dates from the remote past and contains difficulties of language and allusion, to read it on the page enables us to study it at our leisure and return to the arts that demand scrutiny.

But even it a play may be seen in a theater, sometimes to rad it in print may be our way of knowing it as the author wrote it in its entirety. Producers of Shakespeare's //Hamlet, King Lear, Othello// and other masterpieces often leave out whole speeches and scenes, or shorten them. So reading a play allows for the reader to see first hand what the creator envisioned and not some aspiring Speilberg's version. There are also the actors to consider. Each actor brings his/her own take to the play and to the character he/she is playing. There are often layers upon layers of interpretation to wade through before really getting at the original play. Reading the play gives you a chance to create the character, to imagine the scene, and to "see" what you want to see.

Most plays, whether seen in print or in a theater, employ some conventions: customary methods of presenting an action, usual and recognizable devices that an audience is willing to accept. In reading a great play from the past, such as //Othello//, it will help if you know some of the conventions of the classical Greek theater, for example.

When we read a play on the printed page and find ourselves swept forward by the motion of the story, we need not wonder how-and from what ingredients- the playwright put it together. Still, to analyze the structure of a play is one way to understand and appreciate a playwright's art. Analysis is complicated, however, because in an excellent play the elements (including plot, theme, and characters) do not stand in isolation. Often, deeds clearly follow from the kinds of people the characters are, and from those deeds it is left to the reader to infer the theme of the play-the general point or truth about human beings that may be drawn from it. Perhaps the most meaningful way to study the elements of a play (and certainly the most enjoyable) is to consider a play in its entirety.

Content taken from DRAMA, //Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing.// Tenth Edition. X.J. Kennedy & Dana Gioia.