What Makes A Good "Read?"

I have been reading, late into the night, an old play by a relatively young author. Reading it, because I must pick 20 pages of it, as a work sample for a Grants application. And this much I can tell you—a good play is a good "Read." So many plays are impossible to get through. They pontificate, or they report, ad infinitum, the same thoughts. Even the same lines. They have no action. No passion. No suspense.

I remembered, last night, because the play I was reading was such a good "read," the plays of Chekhov I used to read, over and over again. The thing about a really great play is when the author does not tell you what he or she thinks, but lets the story unfold so that you get the point, maybe three hours after you've read the piece. The play pulls you into its world. You become one with its characters. Lost in the drama of their lives. And what is that, really? It's a good story. A good story is at the bottom of every good play. Why do so many authors think that a play is a place to force an Audience to hear their ideas. A really good play is innocent of lecturing. It lets its characters know less than the author. Just as a good actor knows more than the character he or she plays. The audience then becomes the wise one—not the author, and what makes a play different from a nove. A play is life set before us. Truncated—compressed like the computer can do to a program or a file. The wild passion of its people is never stated. It happens in front of our eyes. Simply...and after with no comment by the author. The author should seem a dunderhead. Naive, gullible, totally taken with his/her characters. Only the reader knows "what's up."

And in every good play, we find a development, a movement forward that actually grips and drags its audience with it. And this development happens on stage. Right in front of our eyes. That is why many actors fall in love with each other when working on a really good play. And the reader of a good play will not wish to put it down until it is ended. And then, will wish o live a little longer in the world they have been allowed to enter—by a really good playwright who knows that "life" on the stage and in a really good play "happens" 'without comment. Without reason, almost. And that, first and foremost, the story that lives behind the plot, makes for a really good "read."