This is the first article in a series that will discuss how the role of cast and creative team members affect the feedback they give playwrights. 

This series of articles was inspired by playwrights taking part in our tablework workshops who reported that the feedback process in workshop didn’t prepare them for the kind of feedback they were receiving in rehearsals and production.  

As we began exploring how we might better prepare them, we discovered three main aspects of the creation, development, and production process that needed clarifying: the different stages of the playwriting process, how the different roles the cast and creative team members served often caused them to read plays differently, and how playwrights and directors have different responsibilities in different models of new work development.

Once we cleared up the points above, we began teaching playwrights how to read a play from the perspective of an actor, director, or other member of the creative team and found that many of the participants had very different ideas on what made a play a play.

So, before we were able to take a deep dive into the roles, we had to define what a play is.

A Literary Object and a Blueprint for Production

It is often said that a play is a literary object and a blueprint for production. It is a literary object because, like novels and poetry, it is an imaginative written work in a recognized art form. It is a blueprint for production because producing a play is often seen as directly comparable to building a house.

Whether you’re the producing a play or building a house, you will need the right contractors, equipment, materials and location. Directly and indirectly, a play lays out what a production needs scene by scene. It conveys the information each actor needs to create a role, what each designer needs to create the mood, atmosphere, costuming and setting of the world, and what a director needs to know to set a vision for the overall production.

The play is what lets a producer know which contractors and what equipment, materials, and location are right to bring to life the play’s production—just as blueprint lets a builder know what is needed to build a house. Without a play, there is no story, themes, character, setting, arch, style, or purpose; only a pile of undefined, unactionable ideas.

Playwright’s Draft, Prompt Book and Published Draft

Although it makes sense to assume that the published draft of a play is the playwright’s draft, in most cases it is not. Most published versions of plays are the prompt book of the original production.

Playwright’s Draft

When people refer to “the playwright’s draft” they are usually referring to either the production-ready draft of the script or the script the playwright is maintaining throughout the rehearsal and production process. Although the playwright writes several drafts before completing a production-ready draft, this is the draft that is discussed at the first production meeting which traditionally happens weeks before the first rehearsal.

The production-ready draft will most likely go through many revisions as it moves through the rehearsal and production process. Throughout that process, the playwright maintains a color-coded draft that includes their own words and work on every rewrite, but won’t include any notes or transcriptions of the production itself.

Prompt Book

The prompt book, often referred to as “the bible” of the production, contains everything in the playwright’s draft alongside all of the necessary information a cast and creative team would need to recreate the production. It includes the director’s staging and blocking notes, the list of lighting and sound and music and special effect cues, the scenic design plan, costume design sketches, and anything else that pertains to the production. The prompt book is the production’s official record and is archived at the end of the show’s run.

The purpose of the prompt book is to ensure that, no matter what, the show can go on. If anything happens to the stage manager during rehearsals or the run of the show, another stage manager can quickly step in and run the show.

Published Draft

If another theatre, school, or organization wants to reproduce the original production of a show, they buy a published copy of the script. The published draft of a play will include everything from the playwright’s draft and transcriptions of the stage manager’s prompt book from the original production. The original director’s staging and blocking, the lighting, sound, music and special effect cues, the set and costume design and so forth will be transcribed from the prompt book and included in the stage directions of the published script. Some publishers, like Samuel French, will even include the cue list, design sketches, prop list, and other stage management documents in an appendix to the script.

This is why it’s not uncommon for student directors to be advised to begin their script analysis process by crossing out the stage directions in the script. The goal here is to remove the prompt script transcriptions from the original production so that the student director is only analyzing the playwright’s draft and developing their own directorial vision independent of the play’s original production. But naive directors who don’t question and work to understand the purpose behind this advice often do the same thing with a playwright’s draft. They end up crossing out key information the playwright has included in the text about the world of the play and its characters, leading to a misinterpretation of the script that leaves them at odds with the playwright.

Real Life Example

Last year we had a playwright reach out to us believing she had failed to communicate her intent with the main character in her script. She intended the main character to be someone who constantly said one thing while doing another. None of the other characters in the piece recognized this behavior, so it was never stated directly in the dialogue that this was what the character was doing.

When the playwright explained it to her director, their response what was that her intent was not clear in the script and she should “add some lines” to make it clear. She didn’t want it directly stated but implied by the dramatic action. 

The playwright then reached out to us to advise her on how she could make this character quality more clear in the action of the scenes. But, when we read the script, we found the character’s actions stated in the stage directions were indeed the opposite of what the character was saying. We advised the playwright to point out to the director how the stage directions and dialogue worked together to communicate this aspect of the character to the audience. 

However, the director’s view was that all actions in a script were part of staging, and staging was the director’s domain, only dialogue was the playwright’s.

At this point, we advised the playwright to reach out the the Dramatists Guild. This kind of situation is often best addressed by the Dramatists Guild. In this case, fundamentally, the director misunderstood their role and the playwright’s role in the development and production process.