by Kirk Woodward
[My friend Kirk Woodward’s back with a new post: “Staged Readings.” His last contribution to Rick On Theater was the
two-part All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes
on 26 and 29 November 2025.
[Play readings, or just “readings,” most ROTters will know, are sessions
in which actors (usually) sit or stand and read the text of a play, either with
or without movement, using primarily their voices to convey the meaning of the
words. There are many different kinds of
readings, as Kirk will explain, depending on what the purpose of the reading
is.
[Staged readings are usually the most elaborate of play readings, and
are often performances in their own right.
As you’ll read, staged readings can be almost fully produced
entertainments, with costumes, blocking, sound and lighting effects, music for musical
plays, props, and even some scenery.
Others are stripped down, and some are in between, like the example Kirk
starts off with, the famous Broadway performance of Don Juan in Hell in 1951.
[Kirk will outline some of what defines a staged reading, but his main
subject is how they work and what the participants have to do to mount one.]
Over
the last few months I’ve attended or participated in a number of readings of
plays, and I want to share some thoughts about what are often referred to,
correctly or not, as “staged readings.” (As we will see, for some readings little
or no “staging” is necessary.) To begin this discussion I present three
statements that I believe are true:
1.
Nothing in theater is as simple as one thinks it’s going to be.
2.
The success of a theatrical event can’t be predicted from its
rehearsals.
3.
Actors will do their best to get something acceptable on stage,
no matter what.
There
are exceptions to these statements, as with probably every guideline or
principle in theater, but, I claim, not many. We will return to those
statements, and with these thoughts in mind let us look at “staged readings.”
An
alternative word for such performances is “readers theater,” and Wikipedia has a useful article under
that heading, including an account of perhaps the best known of such events:
In 1949, a national
readers theater tour by the First Drama Quartet—Charles
Laughton
[1899-1962], Agnes
Moorehead
[1900-1974], Charles
Boyer, [1899-1978] and Cedric Hardwicke [1893-1964]—appeared in 35
states, putting on 500 performances. Their presentation of Don Juan
in Hell [the third act of
the 1903 play Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, who lived from
1856 to 1950] was seen by more than a half-million people.
Columbia Masterworks recorded a performance, which was later re-released in
.mp3 format by Saland Publishing. The Wall Street Journal described
it as “No set, no props, just four actors in evening dress seated on stools
placed behind music stands, reading Shaw's words out loud.”
[The Wikipedia reference to a First
Drama Quartet tour in 1949 is misleading. Laughton toured that year in solo readings
of a range of texts, including the Bible, works by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)—notably
The Pickwick Papers—and contemporary humor by James Thurber (1894-1961).
He also included passages from William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Shaw. He
obviously didn’t tour as the First Drama Quartet, the idea for which didn’t
occur until 1950, which is also when he decided to do readings of a single
play, settling on the third act of Man and Superman. The performance of
what came to be called Don Juan in Hell played at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway
in 1951, toured to several U.S. cities, and returned to Broadway (with a
slightly different cast) in 1952.
[The WSJ article quoted above is “A Tour
of ‘Hell’ in Evening Dress: How Charles Laughton taught America to love Shaw”
by Terry Teachout (1956-2022), the Journal’s late drama reviewer. It was
published on 6 February 2010 and if you are a WSJ subscriber, it’s
accessible on the paper’s
website. If you have access to any of several ProQuest
newspaper databases, it’s also accessible that way in several different formats;
on ProQuest Reference Library, it’s available as a PDF of just the article.]
Today, however, I gather the term “readers theater” is generally
restricted to plays written for the purpose of being read aloud, often at
schools, in order to enhance reading skills and expose students to new subject
matter. The emphasis in such productions, a Google search suggests, is
recreational and educational.
There
is no need to be strict about definitions, but for this discussion I want to
focus on plays that are read aloud for audiences for theatrical purposes. The
operative word here is “staged.”
Even
in theater, a simple out-loud reading of a play (sometimes called a “table
read” when a cast reads a play aloud at the beginning of rehearsals for a
production) is not a performance; it’s an experience that allows the people
involved to hear the play spoken by the
actors who will perform it.
A
staged reading, on the other hand, is performed for an audience. The key word
is “staged,” and it can contain numerous approaches. For example:
• It can be as simple as all the actors sitting in chairs facing the
audience and reading. This is probably the most familiar idea of a staged
reading. However, it barely suggests the possibilities available.
• It can utilize music stands for the actors to put their scripts on while
they’re reading. Again, this is a standard idea, not particularly imaginative,
but what are the alternatives? Either actors put their scripts on something
that enables them to read effectively, or they hold their scripts, inevitably
in different ways – folded over, folded back, underlined or not, and so on.
• It can include movements into different groupings of readers, with
simple or complex “blocking” of the movements. For example, actors may sit when
they’re not involved in a scene, and when they are, they may step to the front.
This again is the simplest choice. An example of a variation is that the actors
readjust their reading positions depending on who they’re talking to in the
scene. This needs to be choreographed, since now the actors are moving around.
• It can be simply or elaborately costumed. Among the alternatives are
“street clothes,” clothes appropriate to the character, costume pieces, and
actual costumes.
• It can include background music (recorded or live), or complete songs
(again, with either recorded or live accompaniment, by a solo instrument or
multiple musicians. Of course, with readings like the Encores! concerts, the
songs are paramount and the dialogue is cut or omitted.
• It can be a “pretend” reading – that is, the actors can in fact have
memorized their lines while they act as though they are participating in a
reading. (In the Encores! and TACT presentations, identified below, the acting has
been so fully realized that it’s been clear the actors were not reading, even
though carried scripts.)
We
can also look at staged readings in terms of their purposes. Again, there are
many possibilities. Among the more interesting:
• They can be used in educational situations, as noted above – helping
students learn to read, to express themselves aloud, to master unfamiliar
languages. Normally these are not public readings, but they can be, and in any
case the fact that they’re heard by others adds to their educational value.
• They can be done practically anywhere, anytime, for entertainment value.
For example, a theater company may use one or more staged readings to enrich or
fill in a season.
• They can be used for commercial entertainment, as in the case of the
First Drama Quartet noted above. In late 2024, for another example, the
comedian John Mulaney (b. 1982) starred in the Broadway production of All
In: Comedy About Love, staged readings of short stories written by Simon
Rich (b. 1984).
• They are often used at the regional theater level as a way of
“workshopping” new plays, reading them before audiences in the hopes of finding
ways of making them more effective.
• They can be an effective way of presenting older material to new
audiences without committing to full staging. From 1943 to 1989 the Equity
Library Theater served this function with plays, as did The Actors Company
Theater (TACT) from 1992 to 2018. Similarly the Encore! series, which began at
the New York City Center in 1992, has served the same function with over 100
highly staged “readings” of musicals.
Theatrical
ingenuity being what it is, these examples don’t exhaust the possibilities for
a staged reading. The point, though, is that inevitably the more features that
are added to a staged reading, the more complex will be the rehearsals.
A
clear advantage of a reading of a play, regardless of its complexity, is that
the actors don’t have to memorize lines – they are reading. This is
important. In an ordinary theatrical production the rehearsal experience can be
divided into two sections – before lines are memorized, and after.
A
digression: occasionally a director insists that actors know their lines by the
first rehearsal, one example being the playwright/director Noel Coward (1899-1973),
We should note, though, that Coward’s actors didn’t always comply. Other
directors emphatically do not want lines memorized until rehearsals have begun
and issues of character and plot have begun to resolve themselves.
Theater
people smile when non-actors ask them, “How do you remember all those lines?”
To my mind, however, that’s a reasonable question. How do we learn all
those lines, and why do we worry so much about it? (At least I worry, and so do
many other people I know.)
One
answer is that an actor uses one or more approaches to memorization. Examples
include:
• Simple repetition – say the lines over and over, anything from
word-to-word to whole speeches.
• With electronic assistance – recording lines on a cell phone, tape
recorder, or other device.
• Learning the lines by repetition in rehearsal. This will happen to some
extent normally, of course. However, relying on this approach doesn’t usually
work, to the frustration of many directors.
These
approaches and others help answer the “how” question of memorization, but for
me the fact is that line memorization nevertheless is close to a miracle, and
if there’s a coherent explanation of the way the process works I don’t know it.
There
are people with photographic memories, of course, and a certain number of
people whose minds simply retain lines easily, but most of the actors I know
have to spend a great deal of time “getting the words down,” and stories about
performers “going up” – forgetting their lines – are legion, even with great
actors.
So
which is better, that the actors memorize their lines or that they read them?
Obviously there’s no “better” – the two are very different processes. A reading
of a play skips the “memorization” step entirely, so some difficulty is
avoided, but, as already noted, there can be more, lots more to deal with – and
a “cold reading,” with no preparation at all, is hardly desirable.
What’s
more, as a general rule, the more familiar actors are with their lines, the
more confident their delivery of the lines will be.
Back
then to “staged readings” – no matter how straightforward the material may be, and
what freedom may be gained by reading instead of memorizing, a director still
needs to run down a mental checklist to see where problems may lie, even it the
answers to many items on the director’s mental “checklist” turn out to say “Not
Applicable.”
Any
director, with any play, needs to spend initial time with the script, absorbing
it, analyzing it, getting to know how it works. A director might feel tempted
to skimp on preliminary script work in a staged reading, but it’s a director‘s
responsibility to be as prepared as possible, and who knows what may be
revealed by study and analysis, even for a simple reading.
Script
preparation begins with the question of how much of the script to read when
it’s performed – one act? Selected passages? The whole thing? Cuts may be
necessary. Even in a straightforward staged reading there are decisions to be
made, including items like confusing or antique passages, inappropriate
language, and moments which may be unclear when read.
Then
there are decisions about how things look and sound. What kind of space will
the reading take place in? Is a backdrop necessary? Will the actors use music
stands to put their scripts on? Will they be sitting when they’re not reading? Will
the actors relate to one another?
Are
musical cues desirable, and if so will they be live or recorded? Are there sound
effects? Will stage lighting be necessary? Will the actors need amplification,
and if so, who will control sound levels? If the answer to any of these is
“yes,” there will have to be equipment, people assigned to it, and cue sheets
to specify when things will happen.
Even
in a simple staged reading, the actors’ movements are not automatic. Do they
enter as a group? Do they exit, either during the play or at the end? How do
they exit – bow? Wave?
Do
they sit until they have lines, and when they do get up, which reading stand do
they go to? It may be advantageous for two actors to stand in particular places
at a given moment, next to each other or at a distance, for emphasis. Do they
always go to the same stands, or is there variety?
Some
plays have vocal effects and these must be identified and specifically
rehearsed. For example, there may be crowd noises when a door opens, or a
moment when all the members of the family are talking together. If the script
calls for special effects, many of these may have to be simulated or suggested
rather than realistically acted out.
The
items listed here are samples that apply for any production, staged reading or
not. There are also questions that are specific to staged readings. For
example, how much narration must be supplied for the audience?
I
have a strong prejudice against reading any more than the minimal number of
stage directions in a staged reading. To hear someone read “He crosses left and
opens the window” drives me crazy. (“He opens the window” might be
necessary.) “He exits” isn’t a lot better.
As
a general rule, it seems to me, a play should be intelligible through its
dialogue alone, and if you can’t tell what’s happening through the dialogue,
it’s probably either not a good play or not an appropriate play for a reading.
After
all this preliminary work, a director must cast the reading. No matter the type
of production, casting is a vastly important decision. Some years ago I participated
in a staged reading where the two lead female roles were drastically miscast – the
actors should have reversed which role they did. As a result the play lost a
great deal of its impact.
The
audience gets a reduced amount of information from a staged reading,
particularly one that’s staged simply, so the appropriateness of the actor for the role matters a great
deal.
Even
in the simplest staged reading there are elements of acting that a director
will want to work on. “Cue pickup” is one – in other words, in general a line
of dialogue should begin the instant the previous line ends, which means an
actor must have “higher cue pickup” – the actor must register what the previous
line means while the line is just starting, rather than when it’s ending.
Robust
cue pickup is one of the easiest ways to assure an audience that it is in good
hands in a reading, or in any production.
A
director must also work on overlapping lines – when two actors deliberately
speak at once – and, as noted above, with crowd effects. A play may also have
“specialty effects” – songs, chants, or deliberately varied styles of speaking.
Each of these must get its own rehearsal time. Extensive singing, of course,
definitely requires rehearsal.
How
much rehearsal? I imagine any director would say, “As much as I can get.” However,
because it sounds easy to do a staged reading, the temptation may be to go for
minimal rehearsal time. And, in non-commercial productions, depending on who is
cast in the reading and what their schedules are like, there may not be much
time available.
One
more characteristic of a staged reading that needs attention, and is often
overlooked, is the issue of where the actors’ attention should be focused
during the reading.
Here’s
the problem: in a rehearsal for a staged reading, all an actor has to do is
read. But the dynamic changes when an audience is present. To what extent is
the actor “playing to the audience,” to what extent is the actor working with
the other actors, and to what extent is the actor simply reading, with primary attention
to the words on the script?
The
answers might seem simple, but what often happens is that a cast finds its attention
divided when it faces an audience. Who am I playing to? A director will do well
to sort this question out in advance, so the actors are prepared as well as
they can be.
For
a specific example of the issues involved in a staged reading, I will use one
in which I recently participated, a staged version of the 1946 film “It’s a
Wonderful Life,” which has become a standard for viewing at Christmastime. The
three numbered points at the beginning of this article all come into play in
this example.
1.
Nothing in theater is as simple as you think it’s going to be.
Our
director, the very talented Kristy Graves, visualized an extensively staged
reading, but immediately ran into scheduling difficulties, both with actors and
with the venue (the lovely auditorium of the Women’s Club of Glen Ridge, New
Jersey).
[It’s
a Wonderful Life Radio Show was presented by the Drama Department of the
Women's Club on Sunday, December 14, 2025, at 5 p.m.]
The
holiday season magnified these difficulties. Kristy had to be resourceful. Often
there were times when principal players simply weren’t available.
We
ended up rehearsing several times at Kristy’s house, including an initial
read-through and work on several holiday songs that were to precede the show
itself. I believe we only had two rehearsals on the actual stage, and the
second of those was the afternoon of the performance. So Kristy had to repeat
some instructions in multiple rehearsals
Music
offered special challenges. We wanted to perform the pre-show music as close to
the recorded originals as we could. However, the vocal lines for the backup
singers weren’t published, or at any rate weren’t available to us, so we had to
learn the parts by ear. (I never got mine completely right.)
Because
the presentation was in “radio show” format, live sound effects were crucially
important. Finding a good way to replicate, for example, the sound of someone
falling off a bridge into the water, turns out to be quite difficult,
particularly if the effect has to be amplified, since sound adds another
dimension of complexity.
Speaking
of sound, the actors all spoke into microphones that suggested those used in
old-time radio studios, and for whatever reason, some mics tended to be
“hotter” than others, more receptive to sound, so adjustments in volume had to
be made by both actors and the person on the sound board.
At
the first of the two rehearsals we would have in the venue, we realized that
the way the play was lit, the stands on which the actors would put their
scripts were in relative darkness! There was no way to redo the lighting. The
solution was to round up reading lights for each stand. Nothing is simple.
2.
The success of a theatrical event can’t be predicted from its
rehearsals.
Thank
goodness for that! In our production of Wonderful Life we never had an uninterrupted
read-through, never had all the sound effects in place, and only fitfully had
all the actors present at the same time. Nor did Kristy have much time for
character work.
We
were changing movements and even occasionally line assignments up to the last
moments of rehearsal. Kristy apologized for the lack of rehearsals, urged us to
do our best, and told us the result would be fine. What else could she say? And
there’s always the hope that . . .
3.
Actors will do their best to get something acceptable on stage,
no matter what.
This
principle, which I have seen justified many times, does not mean that the
production will be “good” by any reasonable artistic standard. It may not mean more
than that the actors do not make fools of themselves. However, that’s
something, particularly from the actors’ points of
view.
One
of the principles of acting is that if an actor focuses strongly on something
in a play, the audience will focus too – even if it’s the wrong thing! This
simple fact has redeemed much bad directing and inadequate rehearsal time. Our
direction was fine but we certainly didn’t have much time. But everyone came
through.
Obviously
the risks of disaster are fewer in a staged reading than in a full production,
because the script is always present for security. In fact a good staged
reading might be the preferable way of experiencing some plays.
An
example might be those plays written in other eras which are considered
unstageable today, like Queen Mary (1875) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892),
a verse drama which is said to have points of interest but is seldom or never
performed. In fact a good staged reading might be the preferable way of
experiencing plays not written to be staged, but to be read as literature (called
“closet plays” or “academic plays”).
One
final thought about readings, and about theater in general – if the story is
strong, the audience will follow it, regardless of whether they’re attending a
reading or a memorized performance. I saw this demonstrated recently in a
reading led by a team from the Royal Shakespeare Company, at Montclair State
University in Montclair, New Jersey.
The
team led a two-week acting workshop with college juniors, ending with a staged reading
of the play Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) that succeeded
as well as any production of the play I’ve seen, and better than most.
The
reason was that the actors had fully committed to the story. The fact that
actors didn't have to focus on learning the lines in rehearsal and then
remembering them in performance gave them more freedom for making everything,
including its language, take its place within the narrative. The fact that the
actors carried and read from their scripts made no significant difference that
I could tell.
Ultimately
theater is storytelling, and the more effective the storytelling, the better. Using
that criterion, with effective use of the tools of theater a staged reading
needn’t necessarily feel inferior to fully staged productions, and occasionally
might even be preferable.
[Something came up while I was working on Kirk’s “Staged Readings.”
In some of my exchanges with Kirk, I think I occasionally used the term
"oral interp" in our discussions of readers theater. I remember
back when I was growing up, when I was in elementary and middle school, I
occasionally heard people mention Oral Interpretation as a class offered in high
schools and, sometimes, colleges. I was never at a school that had that
in its curriculum, and I think few schools in my day did. But I know I
heard people talk about it.
[I looked it up to see if it was real, or if I invented the
memory. It was part of the Elocution or Rhetoric programs that most
schools had in the late 19th and early 20th century—before Speech or
Communication programs became current. Theater or Drama classes weren't
common because training in the arts—or, really, any vocation—was spurned by
most educational systems.
[That's where readers theater really came from—dramatic reading was a
way of teaching elocution, verbal expression, public speaking, argument and
debate, and so on. If anyone’s ever been to one of the many forensic
competitions, when students (almost always high schoolers) present monologues,
sometimes 2-person scenes, debates, and other oral presentations, those are
remnants of the elocution programs, now relegated to competitions rather than
instruction.
[I differ with Kirk’s definition of “readers theater” as “plays written
for the purpose of being read aloud.”
I’d say the distinction isn't in the play, but the production. Consider Don Juan in Hell, which he
led with and which is an excerpt of a play meant for full staging, and Under
Milk Wood, originally a radio play.
[Before Laughton produced Don Juan in Hell as readers theater, he toured
with readings from the Bible, prose works, poetry, and essays, as well as
excerpts from other plays meant to be staged in full. The plays presented by TACT and Encores! were
all originally staged in full productions.
[Kirk insists that “today . . . the term is used for plays
written specifically for teaching children to read, with no particular
intention of producing them.” Maybe that’s
correct and I’m working from an era that’s passed. Kirk references a recent Broadway production
of readers theater (2024’s All In), followed by a current successor (2025’s All Out,
running through March 2026), but there’s a dearth of recent staged readings on
the model of DJiH, which would make his definition of readers theater
more likely to hold than I thought when I raised my protest.
[I can't think of any recent readers theater performances around here (that
is, New York City) lately, other than TACT, which ceased production in 2018,
and Encores!—I actually missed the announcements of All In and All Out. (Encores! is currently finishing its run of
1964’s High Spirits, a musical adaptation of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit
[1941], on 15 February 2026.) I don't
know about the regional repertory companies, which may have presented some.
[I think there’s something fundamental hidden in the various approaches to
staged readings Kirk enumerates—if one also considers readings for workshopping
purposes, where the significant listeners are the playwright, director, producer/artistic
director. and/or dramaturg.
[In a performance reading—and even in a rehearsal reading and a reading as
a “test run” for potential future production at which are either subscribers to
the theater and/or invited members of the public, then the focal point is not
just the text alone, but what the actors can do with it—that is, “acting.”
[When the focal listeners are the staff professionals who are assessing
the play, then the focus is what the playwright wrote, without the enhancements
brought by the actors and the director.
(In the future, AI robots might do this job with their “acting” algorithms
turned off—no “oral interp.” Getting an
actor not
to act may be impossible!)
[In the list of memorization approaches that actors use, Kirk left out actors
putting the script under their pillow and sleeping on it. Of course, he omitted that because it’s a joke
. . . but I’ve met some actors who actually tried this! Some of them believe it worked. (It doesn’t.)
[As for "stories about performers 'going up,'" in the ROT posting of the Stephen
Colbert interview of Tom Hanks, The Late Show host asks Hanks about
going up on lines he, himself, wrote, and on Broadway World, George
Clooney speaks about getting lines wrong in Good Night, and Good
Luck. I also told a tale on myself—at a very young age—in the afterword
to Kirk’s “Theater
for Young Audiences.”
[In his discussion of issues that require script preparation when Kirk
writes about “moments which may be unclear when read,” I’m reminded of an
instance I recounted at the end of the afterword to “Dispatches
from Spain 11: Northern Spain” (11 October 2015) by Rich Gilbert. I wasn’t working on a reading, but an acting
class scene; nonetheless, it’s a case in point. This one has to do with humor literally lost
in translation:
[W]hen I was . . . studying acting, my scene
partner and I were assigned a scene from the 1935 play Tovarich [by
Jacques Deval (1895-1972); French playwright, screenwriter, and film director].
Now, Tovarich is a comedy, and after my partner and I got the
scripts, I discovered that it was originally a French play [1933]. I got
the French text from the library . . . and found that the scene my partner and
I were assigned was light and amusing (which wasn’t obvious from the English
translation), but it was based on a French pun. The joke was built around
the similarity of the phrases fond d’artichaut, or ‘artichoke
heart,’ and fond d’argent, ‘money fund.’ There was no way in
the world we could make the pun work in English (if there had been, I suspect
Robert E. Sherwood [1896-1955], the English adapter-playwright, would have used
it)—it was just lost. All we could do with our knowledge was lighten up
our approach to the scene since we now knew that the characters, a husband and
wife, were having fun with one another.
[As for theater being “storytelling,” as Kirk observed, in “The
Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011), I stated:
one of humanity’s earliest impulses was to
communicate, to teach or explain events of import to the community. That impulse predates written language so it
was channeled into two other outlets: art and performance. The first theatrical performances must have
occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire
to replay for the rest of the clan the day’s success. This surely led ultimately to modern theater,
and, eventually, film, television, and even YouTube . . . .
[(I derived this remark from a similar one I had made in “Performing
Fact: The Documentary Drama,” a class paper I wrote for NYU in 1986 and posted
on Rick On Theater in 2009.)
[In “The Tip of the Iceberg: Creativity and Repression in the U.S.,” in an
essay published in the Performing Arts Journal of September 1991 (13.3: 25-41), director Leo
Shapiro, about whom I’ve posted many times, wrote: “Culture is a story told
around a fire.” That was his metaphor
for theater.]
