Read Plays

Dear “theatre people” (and also “non-theatre people”),

Read plays. Read lots of plays.

Depending on how you read them, they can be quick reads, which is gratifying because then your shelf will have a few more books you’ve already read among the books on your shelf that you feel guilty about not having read yet.

And do keep them on your shelf after you read them, because you should also re-read plays.

Yes, re-read plays, and discover new things. About how different the world was when the play was written, and how different the world was when you first read the play, and how different you were when you first read the play.

Read bad plays. Interrogate why you consider them bad. What makes them bad? What can you still learn from them? Surely something in each of them works. Is the play bad, or do you just disagree with what it says about the world?

Read good plays. Interrogate why you consider them good. Is it because other people said they’re good? Is the play good, or do you just agree with what it says about the world? Notice which emotions you experience. Go back and observe how the play evoked those emotions; see how the sausage is made, especially if you’re a writer. Or don’t; let the emotional experience be enough.

Read long plays. Read short plays. Either way, try to read them in one sitting, or with the prescribed intermissions – like they were intended.

If you have trouble with lots of characters, read monologue plays and two-person plays; those might be easier for you, and might make for better reading on the train. You could spend a whole lifetime in either category.

Read plays you’ve never heard of.

Read plays that haven’t been published, which are just the plays that didn’t find commercial success in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or London. Read plays that touched audiences in other places. Considering how arbitrary the barriers to publication are, the category of plays that have been published excludes a lot of good and includes a lot of bad. (Don’t get me started.)

Read new plays. Read plays that haven’t been produced. Read plays that haven’t figured it out yet. Read a play by someone you know and talk to them about it. Don’t give advice; ask questions. Learn what you can about this person’s process, their intent, their hopes and fears. This is a person who is trying to ask or tell the world something – although they may not know what that thing is. Spend time with them in that unsolved mystery. Buy them a drink or a muffin.

Read plays you’ve heard of.

Read old plays. Read the classics by the dead-white-guys. Notice how they echo: their influence echoes into more contemporary plays, doesn’t it? What sounds are still echoing? What sounds are not? What sounds should keep echoing? What sounds should not?

Also read old plays we hear less about, the ones written by the dead non-white-guys. Now you have a slightly fuller picture of the past.

Sometimes, when you read a play, you’ll want to read quickly. Go for it. Occasionally, though, stop and examine a sentence. Really get in there, under the hood: consider its architecture, its specificity, its punctuation. The vowels, the consonants, the lengths of words, the rhythm of breath. What could this sentence have been instead, and why is it this one? You may be conscious of things the playwright wasn’t conscious of. That’s okay -- the playwright is conscious of plenty more.

Read plays by and about people who don’t look like you. Read plays you’re worried you won’t “get”. Read plays that aren’t “for” you. Read plays that are in genres you don’t typically engage with. Be comfortable with the possibility that things will go over your head; you will be challenged, you will be bored, you will be confused. When those things happen, continue on. Be comfortable with the possibility that you will not get everything out of the play that you could have. You surely got something.

Read just a few plays you hate. Discern the heck out of them. Read a few plays that offend you. Read a few plays you find distasteful. Read a few plays by people you find reprehensible. Take care of yourself while you read them, those problematic plays, those plays that make mistakes, those plays that represent everything you find wrong in the world.

But then remind yourself that the person who wrote it was once a baby. Maybe meditate on some of the ways in which the world begat this playwright from that baby.

                                        

See plays. Yes, see them, of course. Seeing is a way of “reading”.

Go see a play, and then get the script. Hold the script in your lap, then pause before you dive in: what do you wonder about how it exists on the page? What moments are you curious to see, plain in front of you, black and white and lifeless?

Now read it.

Look for surprises. Look for how the play is different than the production. Look for how the production got the play “right”. Look for how the production got the play “wrong”. Look for where the production did the play favors. Look for how the production sold the play short. Look for stage directions – where the playwright whispered to you. They wrote something you suspected they wanted you to hear; they slipped it right in there; it went right over the character’s heads, but you knew the playwright was at work there, shooting you a wink from across the fourth wall.

See plays you’ve already read, too. While you’re waiting for the play to begin, remember some of the ambiguities in the script – wonder how the production will interpret them.

When you watch the play, keep an eye on the audience for at least one moment of surprise that you know is coming. Watch them as they discover it. This is, on one level, what we call “dramatic irony.” Enjoy that moment of complicity with the playwright.

(I find it tempting to just watch them watch, but remember to watch the play, too.)

Share plays. Tell people about them. Tell them about the ones you’re confused by and see if they can help you “understand” it. Discover what they notice and you don’t. Notice what you discovered and they didn’t. Share plays by lending scripts. Share plays by attending them together. Share plays by telling people to go to ones you saw. Share plays by going to ones people told you to.

If you’re bold, talk to the stranger who sits next to you in the audience.

This is one way in which plays are dialogues, even when they’re monologues.

Think about it: a group of people got in a room and spent time laboring over this script as they rehearsed. They did so much of the work you did: they encountered it, interpreted it, and discovered it – with each other. Then they went home. They lived lives. They were flesh and blood people just like you. They did things that have nothing to do with the play: routines, day jobs, paper cuts, jars of olives. And then they went back to encounter, interpret, and discover it all over again the next day at rehearsal. Because something in them saw some value in what the playwright had to say or ask. (Or value in what the company had to pay them, but let’s not go there.) Possibly another group of people in some other city or at some other time did the play, too. They had their own process. They encountered the same play in their own way.

Could those groups have seen the same thing? Was it differently important to them each?

Go see the same play produced by two different companies; you’ll see what I mean.

I believe plays teach us how to communicate better, how not to communicate. They teach us why it went poorly in the tragedies, and how people succeeded in the comedies. If we read the play well, we encountered it with other people, and learned with them. Picture a triangle: you, your neighbor, and the play.

A play is a sacred text that you pore over together. But a play is just a thing. In fact, it isn’t even a thing. It’s just an idea that you and the playwright both have, and anyway your and the playwright’s ideas of that idea overlap, incompletely. The play is just a catalyst.

                                                  

No, what matters about the play is that it helps you connect more. With yourself, with others.

The world is unwell. If we learn how to connect better, we may be able to help the world become well. Well, well-er, at least.

So read plays together.

Read my plays. (I’m kidding. (Imagine if that was my central point? (To be clear, don’t necessarily not read my plays, either…)

But seriously, read plays.

Read lots of plays.

-       MJ Halberstadt