by Jean Sidden

Created on: May 20, 2010

Playwrights actually seek public critiques through a process called a "reading", or a "staged reading." Many times these events come with a feedback session at the end where an audience of strangers shares their impressions of what they just heard. The audience for a reading may or may not have friends of the playwright in attendance.

No playwright enjoys these sessions unless the audience is made up of producers who have pockets full of money and want to take the play to Broadway. Sadly that audience is part of another stressful event called a backer's audition. The backer's audition doesn't usually take place until a preliminary production has been mounted, often at the playwright's expense, at the Off or, more likely, the Off Off Broadway level.

Being granted a "reading" is a signal that someone likes the playwright's work enough to have it heard out loud in a public arena. The reading is usually a free event and the point is for the playwright to open a vein and receive public criticism. The next step is perceived to be the playwright going away somewhere into seclusion and rewriting their play based on what the audience tells them.

Often the audience at a reading are those who have an interest in what is known as "play development." This could include actors, directors, dramaturges and students. Each one of these categories of theatre folk offers their criticism from what they consider to be the point of view of an expert. Each one of these categories has a separate interest in the play. The actors all want roles in the play and insist the characters be brilliant, beautiful and likable; the directors want the play to have a clearly discernible Aristotelian structure, the dramaturges want to completely rewrite it and be given credit as co-authors and the students have no idea what they are doing. The criticism that comes from all these different areas of interest could be disparate, redundant, often ignorant and quite confusing.

Many playwrights have learned how to successfully fend off the public critique of an audience feedback session, caring only for having had the reading in the first place. Often a playwright can hear for themselves where the problems are in their scripts and don't need strangers telling them. Sometimes playwrights are so defensive they can be downright antagonistic.

The irony about a reading is that more playwrights get only readings of their plays and no productions than the other way around. Therefore many playwrights write for readings rather than writing for the three dimensions of an actual staged production of their work. And the upshot is the audience feedback public critique is commenting on a reading and not a production. It takes an extremely well-tuned ear and mind's eye to hear and envision, from a reading, the final work that will live when it is mounted onstage.

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