Benefits of Staged Readings in Plays

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, here today to talk to you about formatting and play production. Now we're going to talk about stage readings. This is an important aspect of the playwriting process. Stage readings. First off, what is a stage reading? A stage reading is basically a simple reading of your work. There may be an audience present but there doesn't necessarily have to be. Essentially, what this is, is a group of actors, sit around at a table or on a stage, they have the scripts in front of them, and they read the script aloud. It's basically a chance for you, the playwright, to listen to your work said by actors. This is very helpful because sometimes you'll learn that the phrasing might be awkward for an actor to say and you want to say, "Oh, yeah, they accidentally changed the line to a certain way and I like that a lot better." So this is a way in which you can hear your work read and get some insight into that. You can also talk to the actors, see what they thought about the script. It's a good idea to get some feedback. Feedback is always a positive thing. Writing is rewriting so you always want to get feedback, you always want to be--you always want to have people critiquing your work. At this point, you can have people in the audience. You have people in the audience talking and you can talk to them. You can say, "Hey, what did you like about the play? Did you get that part at the end? Did that make sense?" And this way, you can--you're not just living in your head. There are a lot of things that you put in your script sometimes and you think, "Yeah, yeah, that works, that works" and then someone will find illogical and you'll be like "Oh my god, I didn't even think about that." So this is just basically adding a couple of eyes, fresh eyes on the script. Sometimes your eyes can get tired, sometimes you're thinking everything's all right and then you find something that someone else can point out that might help change the script, that might add something new to the script. And so these are ways in which a stage reading can be a very positive experience for a playwright when they have a new script that they want to get out into the world but they're not quite ready to stage it yet."