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Author's
Vision of a Play
ON MODERN PLAYS - by G.L. Horton
ANIDOV wrote: "The interesting thing in this discussion
is that actors/directors seem to think the author wrote only the
text of the play. But the author "envisioned" all of
it -- the setting, the space, the furnishings, the props, even
the lighting and maybe music."
Sometimes, sometimes not. I have plays that I've "seen"
in my head and written so as to make it difficult for people
to stage any other way, and plays that are basically a sound
track at a fairly high level of abstraction and don't even indicate
the age and gender of the characters, let alone the set and
furniture and staging. Most of my stuff is somewhere in between.
I read lots of plays-- they too are all over the map. Plays
that I've picked up as printed copies of the script in London
at the producing theatre: no character names or descriptions,
no scene locations, "impossible" indications of setting
(night sky, a zillion stars falling to earth, exploding and
turning into dust balls that blanket the garden in house-high
drifts of dirty gray snow..."), not attempted in the staging
I saw, but "inspirational".......
Archives—Essays and Commentary
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