From page to stage

I'm sure he wasn't the first to say this, but he was the first to say this to ME: I recall the great director and playwright Peter Hinton, now the Artistic Director of English theatre at the NAC in Ottawa, observing that plays "are only incidentally works of literature." The text on the page has its own virtues and values, but it may have only overlap with that which finally ends up in the mouths of actors on stage. And the play is only one part of the "performance text," which includes all the gestures, movement, staging, set, props, costumes, lighting, sound and music in fantastic co-ordination and combination that the audience experiences in the theatre. Our culture is fairly obsessed with language--even as it abuses and distorts it to maximize profits-- and we tend to forget that words are only part of the unfolding picture of a play in flight. For, as the REALLY GREAT English playwright David Hare has said, "the play is in the air," between the stage and the seats, not the words that you can buy on the pages of a book. I love that. That's why plays can be such a colossal bore to read: who the hell wants to READ a play?! I'm being facetious here, of course; and perhaps the more distinctive a playwright's writing is, the more successful her play may be on the page. Read Sarah Kane to see what I'm referrin to here.And it's always wonderful to re-visit Mr. Shakespeare, as I have been doing lately. When Lady M starts in on those terrifying speeches she has on her list, you really wake up, and so do the hairs on the back of your neck.But I say all of this in reference to the ways in which the text of Beggars Would Ride has changed in rehearsal on the way to the stage. The writer in me has had to endure, so many times, an actor approaching me to say, "Um, can we change this line? I feel like she/he wouldn't say that here." As galling as that has been at times, at least to the writer in me, mostly it was really useful and salutary, refreshing the director's approach to the staging of the piece, in which the highest priority is, and has been, telling the story with as much strength and clarity as possible. Such is the nature of the trip from the computer screen to the actors on the set.