Prelude III

The prelude on reading drama highlights the pleasures readers of plays experience. Much of our pleasure in drama arises from the way the language of a play’s script comes alive in the speech of living actors. Part of our pleasure involves watching (or imagining) actors dramatically enacting the characters they portray. We enjoy the way the actors/characters walk and talk, the way they interact with other characters, the way they communicate through facial expressions and bodily gestures. Even the smallest gesture, such as a raised or lowered hand, or the slightest facial expression, such as a downturned lip, can contribute to our sense of a play’s dramatic human experience. These are some of the pleasures of experiencing plays. But there are others, as well. Among them is that drama is a mimetic art, one that imitates or represents human life and experience. A large part of the pleasure drama generates results from its ability to reveal aspects of human life meaningfully dramatized, vividly actualized. Drama is also an active art in which actors portraying characters serve as agents, doers, who make things happen through speech and bodily action. Actors perform the scripts of plays. They enact those scripts, bringing them to life. In addition, drama is an immediate art, one that represents action that occurs in the play’s present. Our experience of drama is one of watching events as they occur. We are firsthand witnesses of present-tense action rather than auditors who simply hear about events from a narrator at secondhand after the fact. As Wendy Lesser notes in Why I Read , what we witness in watching a performance of a play are people like us standing on a stage, “representing actions and emotions that cry out for our sympathy, our hatred, our anxiety, our laughter, our distress” (64). We know, of course, that the people on stage are “actors,” and that they play assigned roles that have been scripted by the dramatist. We engage, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge has written, in a “willing suspension of disbelief” in them (8). It is interesting, however, that for the hours that we watch actors perform, we give them life, and in doing so they enable us to feel our own emotions.