Process of a Script Reader
Posted by Pat King on 12/17/2009
A few weeks ago, talking to a friend about my work reading scripts for Steppenwolf, I was asked probably the most common question I hear about the job: “Has anything you’ve read ended up in their season?” The short answer is “no,” or at least “not unless they finally take my advice to produce Fran Guinan in The Belle of Amherst this year,” but it struck me that it’s worth exploring how exactly the process works, and hopefully to articulate what I’ve been up to the past five years (give or take) as a reader.
In essence, how it works is this: I get a batch of five scripts every two weeks to read and evaluate. I’ll sit down and read through them (sometimes aloud, sometimes not), let them rest for a day or two, and then come back to write them up. The evaluations consist of a brief, action-driven plot synopsis (David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards provides a model here) and a “comments” section. The comments section is the meat of the evaluation, but it’s often informed heavily by the synopsizing: laying out the events of a play tends to expose its strengths and weaknesses as character motivations are held up to scrutiny and overall narrative structure gets rebuilt by the reader, often clarifying authorial intent along the way.
That being said, narrative is only a part of the story (and it can be a very small part, depending on the playwright’s interests and ambitions). To me, the most enjoyable part of script reading is getting a sense of the author’s voice: the specific vocabulary and cadence of the characters, but also the rules of the play’s reality (American Buffalo has recognizably realistic rules; contrast it with Kafka on the Shore or 4.48 Psychosis, which operate in wildly different universes), as well as how the playwright sculpts character interactions and scenes (Charles Mee is apt to send his characters into a spiral of philosophy and poetry in the midst of a realistic scene; Pinter tends to carve out all but the absolutely essential). This is where evaluating is fun: getting a sense for how a playwright works and what his or her preoccupations are, and working from that to get a bead on how successfully that comes across in the execution.
While some weeks are tougher than others - the very bad and very good scripts are a lot of fun, while the in-between are tremendously difficult to write about - it remains really fresh and illuminating for me. I haven’t read scripts that have ultimately been produced at the ‘Wolf, but in many ways that’s the least of my concerns. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that a script doesn’t meet a theatre’s “needs,” but it is nonetheless true that a beautifully-written play is only part of the puzzle. At some level, my work only starts the conversation: there are questions of timeliness and whether a script speaks to the world outside the theatre that we begin to tackle, but at a season planning level, that dovetails with the question of how the season’s plays resonate with each other and cohere as a group, to say nothing of the fact that, as an ensemble-based theatre, we’re looking for work that engages with our ensemble members as directors and actors. To a certain degree, while I’d love to “discover” a play that lands on Steppenwolf’s stages, my job is much simpler: to champion exciting, interesting writers that should be on our radar, and to articulate what makes their work sing.