3 How to Read a Play and Watch a Production
Kiara Pipino
You are likely familiar with reading a novel, a short story, an article, or many other forms of narratives. Plays are a different beast, and unless you are in the theatre business, the chances of you reading a play are rather small. Unlike any other form of fiction, plays are exclusively written through dialogue (what the characters say) and stage directions.
Reading Stage Directions
In a written play, you won’t find paragraphs that describe how the characters feel or what the characters see. Instead, there are stage directions, which deal with what needs to happen on stage or with what the stage/characters look like or do.
Stage directions are useful to the director, the actors, and the designers to understand the mechanics of the performance: where is the scenic design? What does the space look like? Where do the characters enter from? Where do they exit? They also provide information about what needs to happen outside of the dialogue, such as a sound—a doorbell or a telephone ringing.
The way stage directions are written is visually different from the dialogue. Usually, they are italicized and separated from the dialogue.
It is important to understand whether the stage directions have been written by the playwright or if they just relate to the original production of the play. In the first case, it is important to follow them as they represent the will of the playwright, while if they are just a report of what happened in a previous production, they can be discarded. Either way, they are never read out loud on stage! Famous American playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are famous for writing very specific stage directions.
Identifying Characters: Who Are They?
Every play has a protagonist. The protagonist is the character who carries the story and pushes it forward. It is the character who changes the most during the course of the play. In the case of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, they are both protagonists but actually function as one (as they are a couple). Some actors will consider the protagonist the character with the most lines, but while that might often be the case, it is not the correct definition. There are, in fact, cases in which the character with the most lines is a supporting character, for example in the case of a play with a narrator—like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town— or in Shakespeare’s Othello, in which the character who has the most lines isn’t the title role. The protagonist is the character who needs to solve the main conflict and overcome the main obstacle.
As a matter of fact, women were not allowed to perform at the time and female characters were played by men wearing masks.
The embodiment of the obstacle is called the antagonist. Now, while the protagonist is ALWAYS a character in the play, the antagonist can be a character or something else, like a disease, society, a concept, or a fear. To understand who the antagonist is, the best way is to focu