Read what makes the next thing happen.
Reading a play for performance
You have read the play, learned your lines, and built an elaborate account of your character. Then your director asks what changes in the scene. You offer an adjective. The question remains. David Ball’s teaching can sharpen your reading of dramatic action. His Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays treats the script as something built for performance, with events that alter what can happen next.
Ball worked as literary director at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis under Michael Langham. He taught acting, directing, and script analysis at Lawrence, Carnegie Mellon, and Duke universities. His publisher also records artistic leadership at Pittsburgh's Metro Theater and literary leadership at Pittsburgh Public Theater. His work connects script analysis to the demands of teaching and making theatre.
Life and work
Ball worked as a dramaturg and playwright at the Guthrie during the 1970s, became a professor at Carnegie Mellon in the early 1980s, and directed Duke Drama through 1991. A dramaturg investigates how a play works and helps a production engage its text and theatrical world. That combination of literary and production work helps explain the manual's emphasis on reading for performance.
His adaptations of Molière include Tartuffe, The Miser, and The Imaginary Invalid. PlayMakers Repertory Company documents productions involving these adaptations and his collaboration with director Dominique Serrand. Ball's relationship with dramatic construction includes adapting work for the stage as well as explaining how to read it.
What you read in Backwards & Forwards
First published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1983, Backwards & Forwards examines the structure of a play through action and consequence, the disturbance of an existing situation, obstacles, exposition, character, imagery, and the work of rereading. Shakespeare's Hamlet provides an extended point of reference. The publisher identifies actors among the theatre practitioners for whom the guide is intended.
The title gives you a useful orientation. You can follow events forward, then look back from an outcome to investigate what made it possible. Your task is to test connections against the script. A confident impression of a character can be attractive while leaving the action vague. Close reading gives your impression something to answer to. You can ask where your evidence lies and whether another passage complicates your first interpretation.
What changes when you read for consequence
Imagine this scene. Your character asks to borrow a key. Your partner refuses. You reveal information that changes the answer. The key is handed over, and your character leaves. You could describe the passage as tense, intimate, or threatening. Each description might be defensible. Yet none tells you what you need to do at the point where the answer is still no.
What causes the refusal to become permission? Find the evidence. Perhaps your disclosure makes the risk of refusing greater than the risk of agreeing. Perhaps it changes what your partner believes about you. Your performance must make the relevant event available to the audience. You can investigate its timing, its force, and its effect on the other person.
Now imagine that you deliver the disclosure with the same emphasis on every rehearsal. Your partner's response changes, but your prepared delivery does not. You may know the architecture of the scene while missing its present activity. Use your analysis to understand what matters, then let your attention stay available to the exchange. Knowledge of an outcome does not mean your character experiences the scene as already finished.
Questions you can carry into rehearsal
After a first reading, choose an event you regard as decisive. What makes that event possible? What earlier action must you account for? What would cease to make sense if you removed it? Write brief answers with references to the text. Keep an uncertainty visible when the evidence is incomplete. You can bring a precise question to rehearsal more usefully than an explanation you have made impossible to revise.
Next, ask what your character knows at the start of the passage. Separate that knowledge from what you know after reading the ending. Your character may make a disastrous choice for a reason that feels necessary in the moment. If you play the later judgment too early, you can flatten the uncertainty that makes the choice dramatic.
Finally, speak the scene with a partner. Does your reading help you make contact, pursue something, and register a change? Revise it when the spoken encounter exposes a weak assumption. Ball gives you a reason to bring rigor to your reading; your rehearsal gives that reading a living test. You can return to the complete book for its developed method and keep returning to the play for the particulars no general guide can supply.
Read further: David Ball's Backwards & Forwards at Southern Illinois University Press.