TWELVE

READING PLAYS

1997

 

 

 

On the one hand, there’s something rather strange about the idea of reading plays. You could certainly say that what a play is, really, is what actors do together in front of an audience—or a one-person play is what one actor does alone in front of an audience. When you see a play, you see people, members of your own species, engaged in their ordinary physical life in front of you—walking, sitting, digesting, growing older, talking to each other, perhaps touching each other. Their names, in the play, are not their “real” names, maybe, and the words they say to each other may previously have been “written”—but a play is basically a physical experience, for the actors and for you, and most of what you’re seeing is exactly what you seem to be seeing—the actors are talking, they are touching, they’re thinking, they’re feeling things, they’re living in front of you a certain portion of their lives that will never come again. The previously written dialogue drives the actors to experiment with saying what is not true. The dialogue forces the actor to practice the human skill of lying. And actors do perfect that skill and can become extraordinarily convincing. Sometimes the actors conspire together to fool the audience with lies that everyone knows are lies. One actor says to another, “I just swallowed poison,” and that is a lie, and both of them know it, although you in the audience are in some sense fooled. But part of the fascination of theatre comes from the fact that the actors are not always lying. Sometimes one actor may say to another, “I hate you! I hate you!” and the other actor wonders if it might be true, or believes it is, while the actor who says it may be secretly thinking, as we do in life, “Could this possibly be what I really mean?” Our daily pretense that we know who we are is abandoned by the actors, who are led by the dialogue to try out the possibility that what they think and feel is not limited by prior decisions about “who they are” or the supposed outlines of their supposed biographies. The dialogue leads the actor who, in daily life, is known as “sensitive” to become, for a while, insensitive instead, while the actor whose acquaintances call him cold becomes warm and compassionate. The dialogue of a play is part of an elaborate network of personal events in the lives of the actors, just as our own dialogue is in our own daily lives.

It is strange, then, to isolate the dialogue of a play in a book, and it’s strange to read it—to sit somewhere alone and read it silently to yourself. Reading a recipe is not the same as eating a cake. Reading about love-making is not the same as making love.

And yet, on the other hand, one has to say that a written play can have a special magic of its own. Reading a recipe may only remind you of the cake that you wish you could have in front of you, but reading a play can be a rather complete experience. The written play has its own music, its own very pristine existence—words, thoughts, and spirit abstracted from the physical, abstracted from the bodies of actors and their travails through space. There are wonderful things that can happen in the mind of a reader that cannot happen to anyone watching actors in a play. Indeed, the actors are often aspiring, as they act, to approach, in physical reality, the experience they had originally when they themselves read the play—but, as the reading experience is in an entirely different realm, they can never quite manage to hit that target (just as writers may often, with an equal degree of un-success—for the very same reason—attempt to capture in words a powerful mood or a feeling that overwhelmed them in life).

More and more I’ve come to think (perhaps you’ll find this self-serving) that to call plays or stories or poems “good” or “bad” is often not very illuminating, whereas it can at times be extremely helpful to notice that “right now, when I read these particular poems, I feel well, I feel happy, I feel that I am getting something that I have needed.” It’s not that those poems are “the best” poems or that they’re “better” than certain others, but that for you, now, they are important and right. Animals in the forest require certain nutrients, and they learn how to find them. They don’t all need the same things, and they don’t need the same things at every stage in their lives. The nuts that a particular badger finds of very little value may turn out to be crucial for a particular squirrel. As writers, we can’t predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable. But because we’ve all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.