How to Read Drama

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. The Theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

–Stella Adler^[1]

Introduction

If, as Shakespeare said in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts,”^[2] then reading and understanding drama should be an easy task, right? By these standards, we are all actors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are all experts at reading or understanding drama/plays.^[3]

A play is meant to be experienced, seen, and performed. It is a “a composition in prose or verse presenting in dialogue or pantomime a story involving conflict or contrast of character, especially one intended to be acted on the stage.”^[4] As a result, the solitary act of reading the text of a play can be a tedious and confusing process. But never fear, there are ways to approach reading drama which can help you discover the beauty, emotion, and action which live in this genre.

As Emilie Morin, a Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York, has noted, while seeing a live or taped production of a play can help us envision the emotions, meaning, and action of the work, “it is not necessary to have seen a performance of a play to understand its nuances and details.”^[5] In fact, she argues, seeing a performance can change an individual’s reading of the text because performances “add some elements to a playtext [sic] and take other elements out of it.”^[6]  In other words, watching the movie is not the same as reading the play!

So, then, how can you approach a play so you cannot just understand the text, but also form your own opinions first before you search out a performance to see how others have interpreted the dramatic work? A play/dramatic work is:

Directors and actors use stage direction to prepare to bring the play and its characters to life on the stage. As readers, we can also use these stage directions to help engage our imaginations as we work to interpret the written text of a play.

It is interesting to note that while Shakespeare was among the first playwrights to include stage directions in the text of his plays, those original directions have been edited and revised many times to update the language, clarify references, etc. Starting in the 19th Century, it became more commonplace for playwrights to include detailed stage directions, especially at the beginning of a play, to help directors, actors, and readers know how the playwright envisioned their work. In “Stage Directions and Drama Terms,” Michael J. Cummings uses the openings for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as examples of this difference:^[13]

When you consider live theater, it is important to remember that theatrical license is often readily applied to even extremely specific stage directions, and you can end up with amazing productions of The Merchant of Venice set on 1990s Wall Street (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1994) or see The Taming of the Shrew re-envisioned for the big screen as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). Of course, this happens with literary texts outside of Shakespeare/drama too, such as Jane Austen’s Emma which was re-envisioned for the big screen as Clueless. Other texts such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera have also been adapted for both the stage and the big screen. While these last three examples are works of fiction rather than drama, it’s still important to note the dramatic license taken as they’ve undergone the transformation from written word to live/film productions.

Drama on the Page vs. Drama on the Stage

When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, “We’re all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.” If you’re not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.

–David Mamet^[16]

If you decide to watch a film production of a play, be aware that movie directors will exercise a great deal of creative license as they create their vision of the play, resulting in something that can be vastly different from the original written text. It is important to consider what has been cut and/or added and think about how this alters your interpretation of the play.

For example, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film version of Hamlet starring Mel Gibson as the title character combined scenes and cut out many minor characters to create a traditional feature-length film. Six years later, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in the first unabridged film version of Hamlet, holding true to the original text of Shakespeare’s play. The results were two films that approached the play in similar ways but were around two hours long (Zeffirelli) vs. just over four hours long (Branagh).

Theatre critic Charles McNulty spoke about the challenges of critiquing the production of a play vs. the original written text in a 2007 article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “Separating the player from the play,” he noted, “is never easy,” especially since the relationship between plays (written text) and performance (stage/film) involves so many different factors. The way a play is staged and who is cast in the different roles can have a huge impact on how an audience (readers) experience the work. “Great actors, like great critics,” McNulty noted, “can make you alert to shades of meaning and color that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.”

A play asks to be imagined and gives this right to everyone. A play has many lives beyond the page – not simply on stage, but in the minds of its readers. You are one of them.

– Emilie Morin^[17]

Freytag’s Pyramid

Critical Questions to Ask About Drama

Reading drama is an exercise in critical thinking, and learning how to ask questions is a valuable tool in helping you unpack the meaning and content of a play. Jessica Fries-Gaither, an education resource specialist with Ohio State University, notes that

Asking and answering questions while reading is essential for comprehension. … Asking questions before reading helps students access and use their prior knowledge as they construct meaning from a text. Asking questions while reading fosters active engagement with the text, and questioning after reading can be used to check for comprehension and encourage the transfer and application of knowledge.^[20]

So, what are some questions we can ask when we’re reading drama? Stephen C. Behrendt, Professor of English at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, suggests asking questions about plays in the following categories:^[21]

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalisations [sic]!

–Anton Chekov^[23]

The protagonist is one of the main characters. They often have a tragic flaw or make a fatal mistake (e.g. Thor in The Avengers films or Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings saga) and can either be a hero or anti-hero.

The antagonist is another main character, one who fights against the protagonist and often tries to make them fail (think Loki in The Avengers or Voldemort in the Harry Potter series).

Plays also include a wide range of minor characters, often called flat or static characters or foils to a main character, who are there to provide background contrast and often help to develop the storyline for the main characters (e.g. think about all the extras/background characters you have seen on screen in films or TV shows). These minor characters may not have a key role—or even a speaking part in the play—but they help to create the mood of the scene and even draw more attention to the actions and mood of the main characters.

Dramatic Genres^[24]

Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves.

–August Boal^[25]

There are many distinct types of plays, but we will address four of the most common genres here. Note that the plays listed below could appear on more than one list.

The first dramatic genre we’ll look at is comedy. Meant primarily to entertain an audience, this style of drama has a lighter tone and a happy conclusion. Consider the following plays:

Connecting to Drama Through a Critical Lens

One way to interpret a dramatic text is through the lens of literary/critical theory. As Vince Brewton, Professor of English at the University of North Alabama, notes in an article for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the terms literary theory and critical theory are sometimes used interchangeably and are even “undergoing a transformation into ‘cultural theory’ within the discipline of literary studies.”^[28] Brewton notes that regardless of the title applied to the practice, it is a framework of sorts, a “set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts.”^[29]

It is important to note that there is a difference between literary theory and schools of criticism. Brizee and Tompkins note in their contributions to “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” for the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) that the different schools of criticism are unique “lenses [readers] use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture.”^[30] These critical lenses “allow [readers] to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within [a particular] school of theory.”^[31]  As we see here, readers can use literary theory as a critical lens to focus their attention on specific aspects of a text, in the case of our discussion here, a drama/play.

An article for the online forum Pediaa expands on the ideas of the Purdue OWL, noting the inherent differences between literary criticism and literary theory. It reads: “Literary criticism is the study, evaluation and interpretation of literature whereas literary theory is the different frameworks used to evaluate and interpret a particular work. … Literary Criticism is the practical application of literary theory. Literary Theory is a combination of the nature and function of literature and the relation of text to its author, reader, and society.”^[32] Basically, then, literary criticism is the act of using a specific literary theory as a lens through which to read and/or reinterpret a text.

The differences between theory and criticism here might seem slight; however, they are important, especially when you consider that it is natural to first engage with literary texts from an individual reader-response perspective. Prominent starting in the 1960s and continuing to the present day, a fundamental tenet of Reader Response Criticism is that it “considers readers’ reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text.”^[33] In other words, your views and ideas as the reader/audience matter and help to create the meaning of a play.

Where this all gets a wee bit complicated is that while reader-response is, in and of itself, tied to one’s own reactions to or thoughts about a play, at the same time it can also intersect with other critical approaches to reading and interpreting the text. For example, write Brizee and Tompkins, a “critic deploying reader-response theory can use a psychoanalytic lens, a feminists [sic] lens, or even a structuralist lens.”^[34] Literary theory, then, is the vehicle we use to practice literary criticism, uncovering new layers of meaning in a text.

While applying literary criticism to a play might seem a bit confusing at first, it is one way to really peel back the layers to get to the heart of the writing. In critical terms, we would call this deconstruction, the idea that “unified truth” does not exist, and we need to look for meaning in other places (i.e., the “margins” of a text.)^[35] Through this theoretical lens and others, readers start asking questions about how the meaning of a play is made and where we look for it. Different critical lenses will yield different results, ever-expanding and nuanced interpretations of the same literary text.

Let’s Practice: Susan Glaspell’s Trifles

First produced in 1916, Glaspell’s play is loosely based on the 1900 murder of “John Hossack, which Glaspell reported on while working as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News.” In 1917, Glaspell turned her play into a short story, called “A Jury of Her Peers.” As early feminist texts, both Glaspell’s play and the short story version which followed contrast “how women act in public and in private as well as how they perform in front of other women versus how they perform in front of men.”^[36]