Play Directing, 7th Edition

2

What Is a Play?

Analysis and Improvisation

 

 

The playscript is the director’s primary tool. If you don’t know what it is in all of its parts, you will be lost. Treating it with respect is knowing your job at its most fundamental.

Do you know how to read a play? Most people don’t, but go at it by reading the words, as in any other kind of reading, and being caught up in the “story.” A director, however, reads a play in a quite different way, paying attention to all the starts and stops, the gaps, the silences, and the bare minimum of description. Furthermore, the director is aware that it is all dramatic action. As a director, all of this sparks your imagination, and what is eventually done by the acting and the design begins to emerge in ...