Disgraced： A Play-Ayad Akhtar

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ON READING PLAYS

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 pla