The scripts we inherit arrive through two very different traditions.
The older tradition—stretching from the Greeks and Romans through Shakespeare and Molière—treats the play as a species of poetry. The playwright and the poet were not distinct professions, and their texts reflect that unity. What we receive from them is almost pure dialogue: a handful of entrances and exits, the occasional “he dies” for convenience, and otherwise a complete absence of commentary.
For the most part, directors and actors are left on their own to puzzle out the human machinery behind each line. They must do the actual work—discovering intention, relationship, and movement without any prefabricated instructions. Naturally, this terrible burden has prevented anyone from staging Shakespeare for the past four hundred years, and has made creative interpretation entirely impossible.
The second tradition is thoroughly modern: the script as quasi-novel. Here every silence and eyebrow twitch is dutifully recorded. Stage directions appear in generous parentheticals; settings are described with the loving detail of travel brochures; sometimes even line readings arrive pre-packaged. As a private reader, I confess I enjoy this. Nothing is unclear, nothing ambiguous; I know precisely what the author intended—or at least what the author imagined while typing. The script reads like a fully realized production from the moment you crack it open.
But from there, the parenthetical notes tend to expand like a yeast culture, giving us scripts so meticulously annotated that one wonders whether actors are meant to perform the play or simply obey it:
(Late afternoon, a few clouds. A bird flies overhead, possibly a wren, but we cannot see or hear it. The smell of honeysuckle is in the air, mixed with a bit of neoprene. It rained three days ago, so the ground is soft. It might rain again in another day or so, so no need to set out the sprinklers. Just be sure to water the flowers on the porch. And pick up the mail if you get a chance.)
MORINA
(speaking as if to a peplum) What do you think about getting some sushi tonight? (deliberate pause, as though the air in the room had suddenly become thick with undulation) If we go now, we can get back before sundown. (Morina crosses upstage and picks up her sweater, pausing briefly to notice that one of the cuffs is slightly frayed. It probably had always been.)
SALFORTIO
(looks out the window) It looks kind of dark outside, (looks at his watch) but I think we have time. (looks at her sweater) Hey, is that your sweater?
MORINA
(indefatigably) Yes. (maladjustedly) Do you have your wallet?
SALFORTIO
(with two fingers of his left hand adjusts his right sleeve) (hesitant, but mangrovish) What?
MORINA
(predispositiously) Your wallet. (lifts her chin slightly to the right, hypersplenic but not pyelogramic)
SALFORITO
(rectilinearly) Yes. (leans against bookshelf) (enucleatingly) Are you ready?
MORINA
(deeply fimbrinated) Sure. (chancellerious, but nasal) I’ll just put on my sweater. (puts on her sweater, left arm first) (remittally, with a hint of basil) Let’s go. (she crosses to him, coniferous and dispensary.)
SALFORITO
(idiomorphically) OK. (they step down center in a slight arc so as to miss tripping over the ottoman, which was purchased by the previous owner, then cross left to exit through the front door, which is hinged on the left.)
Yes, yes—I am exaggerating. But only by the barest whisker. And truly, I harbor no resentment toward publishers who feel compelled to festoon their scripts with sensory delights and clarifying details. They are in the business of moving books, after all, and a script that reads like a comfortably upholstered novel will always be more appealing to the average reader than a stark column of dialogue marching down the page. If sprinkling in a bit of narrative spice broadens the audience, who am I to object?
The difficulty arises—not on the printed page—but in the rehearsal room, where these embroidered parentheticals too often harden into commandments. Far too many actors and directors, through no fault of character but simply lack of training, have never learned how to read a script with a discerning blade. They cannot yet separate what is essential from what is merely decorative. And so they cling to every instruction as though the playwright had descended from the mount, stone tablets in hand.
I have endured more rehearsals than any mortal should be asked to suffer recollection in which a company dutifully follows every jot and tittle, every prescribed hesitation and lifted eyebrow, with the solemnity of monks illuminating a manuscript. Now and then a brave soul will dare to try a new impulse—a fresh tone, a shift in energy—and for a moment the air in the room stirs with possibility. But just as quickly the poor creature is reined in by a well-meaning but doctrinaire director who treats every parenthetical as holy gospel, immutable and everlasting, when it is so often nothing more than a fleeting image from the playwright’s private little mental filmstrip.
When you receive a modern script, it has usually arrived by one of two very different paths. The first is the modest route: the low-royalty play, often self-promoted, which never enjoyed a triumphant run on Broadway, or off-Broadway, or even in the wilderness of off-off. These pieces populate high school stages and community theatres across the country by the hundreds. In such scripts, every word and every stage direction has passed straight from the playwright’s mind to the page without benefit of rehearsal, revision, or the tempering fire of production.
These works are not disasters—far from it—but neither are they usually towering achievements of dramatic literature. Often the only clues to the story’s internal machinery lie in those dutiful parentheticals the writer sprinkled in along the way. And there is seldom any reason to assume that the playwright is a remarkable actor, or even a competent one, or that his instinctive line readings deserve to be embalmed for all time. On the contrary, the text may well be improved—sometimes drastically—by good actors freeing themselves from the mediocrity of the prescribed delivery. In capable hands, a pedestrian script can rise several degrees simply by allowing the actors to seek their own interpretations rather than obeying the writer’s momentary imaginings.
The second route is the more glamorous one: the new play that catches fire, earns a solid run, and eventually gets picked up for publication. But when a publisher goes looking for the “official” version of the script, they don’t want the playwright’s early draft—too many rewrites, too many abandoned ideas, too many ghosts of lines that never made it past the first stumble-through. What they want is the stage manager’s prompt book: the real-time record of what the actors actually said and did by the time the curtain went up.
That book contains everything—line changes, emergency cuts, accidental discoveries, improvised moments that stuck simply because they worked once and no one questioned them afterward. Every bit of blocking is in there too, fossilized not because it was artistically essential, but because that’s what happened to be done on the night the production froze.
Trying to reproduce that staging simply because it’s printed in the published script is a guaranteed failure. Even if you’re told that a certain line was delivered “angrily,” you have no idea why it landed that way on that particular afternoon, or whether the actor kept it up throughout the run. Maybe she changed it. Maybe it only worked because of what her partner did right before that moment. Swap in a different actor and the whole emotional logic shifts.
Uta Hagen tells a perfect example of this problem in Respect for Acting. While rehearsing The Country Girl, she couldn’t quite locate the tone of a moment—until one day she accidentally got her sweater tangled as she put it on. The flash of irritation opened exactly the emotional door she needed, so she kept the bit. She and the director were pleased, and it became part of her performance.
Years later she discovered that another actress was dutifully wrestling with the same sweater, not because it helped her, but because the stage manager had written it down and the published script had preserved it like some sacred ritual. Hagen was horrified. What had been a personal breakthrough for her is now meaningless shtick for everyone else. This is what happens when stage directions are treated as eternal truths instead of what they often are: residue from someone else’s process, recorded by accident and preserved by habit.
And it isn’t only the “acting notes” that lead performers astray. The stage directions dealing with violence are often even worse. Some are vague to the point of uselessness; others are so specific—yet so physically impossible—that you wonder whether the playwright has ever set foot in a rehearsal room. Many simply describe what the Broadway cast happened to do in that particular space with that particular director. Even those actors wouldn’t reproduce the same choreography under different circumstances.
In almost every case, you’re better off ignoring the literal instructions and asking a far better question: What is the moment actually trying to accomplish? Once you know that, you can find your own way there. The script may call for a slap, but perhaps a shove communicates the beat more clearly. Perhaps stillness does. You simply won’t know until you try it with live bodies in the room.
The same problem crops up in the back pages—the lovingly detailed props lists and costume plots. These are not holy relics; they are a record of what one specific production used, and often for reasons that have nothing to do with the artistic intent of the play. Maybe the extra halberd was hung on the wall to hide a hole punched through the flat by a runaway hammer. Maybe the stool in Act III appeared only because the actor’s knee locked up halfway through previews. These things happen. None of this obligates you to recreate any of it. Make your own list based on what your production needs, not on whatever Broadway used to cover a carpentry accident or soothe someone’s sore leg.
In the end, there are really only two approaches to the stage directions printed in a script:
Method 1 — The Artist (One who breathes life into the latent)
Read the play once to grasp its overall movement and to identify the few moments of action the story genuinely requires. After that, take a thick black marker and strike out everything else. All of it. Every line reading, every prescribed mood, every parenthetical pause, every piece of inherited blocking. Clear the underbrush.
Then build the play from the ground up with the people actually in the room.
Invite the actors to experiment—to try new rhythms, new points of view, new levels of energy. Most attempts will fail; that is the nature of exploration. But the moments that succeed will be discoveries born of real collaboration, not archaeological recreations of someone else’s performance. Those moments are gold. They come from truth, not from habit.
…or…
Method 2 — The Archivist (One who lovingly preserves dead things)
You may instead elect to follow every stage direction as if it were the Ten Commandments etched in granite. This method is ideal for a director who fears ideas—his own or anyone else’s. It ensures that the actors never, under any circumstances, stumble onto anything resembling genuine emotion, which would only disrupt the careful imitation of last decade’s production.
Under this approach, the cast will dutifully hit each line with its assigned emotional decal—angrily, quietly, wistfully, deferentially, wildly—like clerks stamping paperwork. They will move precisely where the Broadway company moved, often for reasons no one remembers. And at the end of the night, everyone can congratulate themselves for having reproduced, with mechanical accuracy, a lifeless replica of a play that once lived.
If my words leave you with anything, let it be this: the script is not the play. It is only the beginning—the dormant shape of what might be. What comes next depends on your courage, your curiosity, and the willingness of your company to bring breath to the latent.