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 a blueprint, a workman’s plan drawn for a group of collaborating artists, and it must contain the seeds of inspiration, the insinuations of truth that will spur the actors and the director and the designers handily to tell the playwright’s chosen tale. The end result of the process that begins with a play is not the encounter with an individual reader in the privacy of a moment, but rather the boisterous and public encounter with a living audience, an act of collective hearing and seeing that is at the root of the theater’s timeless and ritual magic.
There can still be a magic to the reader’s silent encounter with dialogue on a page. This encounter can have the thrill of overheard conversation, the piecing together of circumstance, situation, emotion, the making sense of what we cannot see. These are pleasures of incompleteness, for incomplete is what reading a play can feel like to someone more accustomed to the fullness of a novel. To be sure, a book does call upon the reader to complete the mental picture, but the truth is that a novel gives you more. It must. The novelist uses words alone—not lights or actors or the semblances of places—to cast the story’s spell. Some novelists will amass the details, others will be sparing. But however little you may think to find by way of depiction in even the most economical of novels, rest assured, you will find so much less in even the most voluble of plays.
The wonder of reading a play has to do with what dialogue offers and what it denies. Shakespeare says little about his settings. Plainly announced before the play has begun, the particulars emerge through the course of what follows, through the revelations of dialogue. Our sense of the castle in Elsinore where Hamlet’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 the psychology and circumstance of the one speaking his words. Outer landscape is the reflection of an inner state, and everything the characters say reveals to us 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 is time for digression, as long as digression reveals the depths and subtleties that give the work its distinction, its reason for being. Such economy yields a different sort of interiority than the wondrous—and often encyclopedic—inner current that can run between novelist and reader. In a play, the words are signals; they announce and evoke; as building blocks of a plan, 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 of absence. 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 speaks the hidden truth, never quite articulates the central emotion, but only talks around 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 have something of the thrill of detective work, clues emerging line by line, slowly rounding 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 very form on the page—mostly white space—serves as invitation for the reader. It is a blankness that points the way not only to the empty space of the stage on which the story will eventually unfold, but, well before this can ever happen, to that bareness of a reader’s mind, awaiting, expectant, eager for the pleasure of shared imagination to begin.