Author : Ayad Akhtar Screen Reader : Supported Works with : Source : Status : Available | Last checked: 3 Hour ago! Size : 43,876 KB |
ON READING PLAYS
Plays on the page are neither fish nor fowl. A play is seldom meant to be read.It is meant to be pored over, interrogated, dissected, obeyed. A play is ablueprint, a workman's plan drawn for a group of collaborating artists, and itmust contain the seeds of inspiration, the insinuations of truth that will spurthe actors and the director and the designers handily to tell the playwright'schosen tale. The end result of the process that begins with a play is not theencounter with an individual reader in the privacy of a moment, but rather theboisterous and public encounter with a living audience, an act of collectivehearing and seeing that is at the root of the theater's timeless and ritualmagic.
There can still be a magic to the reader's silent encounter with dialogue on apage. This encounter can have the thrill of overheard conversation, the piecingtogether of circumstance, situation, emotion, the making sense of what we cannotsee. These are pleasures of incompleteness, for incomplete is whatreading a play can feel like to someone more accustomed to the fullness of anovel. To be sure, a book does call upon the reader to complete the mentalpicture, but the truth is that a novel gives you more. It must. The novelistuses words alone—not lights or actors or the semblances of places—tocast the story's spell. Some novelists will amass the details, others will besparing. But however little you may think to find by way of depiction in eventhe most economical of novels, rest assured, you will find so much less in eventhe most voluble of plays.
The wonder of reading a play has to do with what dialogue offers and what itdenies. Shakespeare says little about his settings. Plainly announced before theplay has begun, the particulars emerge through the course of what follows,through the revelations of dialogue. Our sense of the castle in Elsinore whereHamlet's fate is being decided comes to us from the characters' mouths. Indeed,in Shakespeare, description is never simply his own; it is always colored by thepsychology and circumstance of the one speaking his words. Outer landscape isthe reflection of an inner state, and everything the characters say reveals tous their hearts and minds.
It is true that everything in a play operates—or at least should.It is an exacting form. The plot must move, and the words must move it. There istime for digression, as long as digression reveals the depths and subtletiesthat give the work its distinction, its reason for being. Such economy yields adifferent sort of interiority than the wondrous—and oftenencyclopedic—inner current that can run between novelist and reader. In aplay, the words are signals; they announce and evoke; as building blocks of aplan, they do not consummate, but rather promise; they direct, conceal, uncover.
On the page, the language of a play can seem to be pointing always to a kind ofabsence. After all, so much is missing: the actors, the set, the audience.What's more, in the finest plays, it seems that the dialogue never quite speaksthe hidden truth, never quite articulates the central emotion, but only talksaround such things, leaving space for the audience to complete the connection.It is a form that thrives on omission, which is why reading a play can havesomething of the thrill of detective work, clues emerging line by line, slowlyrounding out the picture that is the deeper reason for the play itself.
Absence, then, is the reigning principle of a written play, and even its veryform on the page—mostly white space—serves as invitation for thereader. It is a blankness that points the way not only to the empty space of thestage on which the story will eventually unfold, but, well before this can everhappen, to that bareness of a reader's mind, awaiting, expectant, eager for thepleasure of shared imagination to begin. (Continues...)Excerpted from Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar. Copyright © 2013 Ayad Akhtar. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.