I love the "Harry Potter" series. I spent the first two decades of my life reading the books, watching the movies, or waiting for the next installment in the story. So I understand the Muggle world’s excitement over the recent release of the “eighth Harry Potter story” — the script of the two-part play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

As a playwright, I can’t take part in that excitement.

It’s not that I don’t think the "Harry Potter" world belongs in play form. Far from it — I expect that “Cursed Child” is a wonderful play. I assume it successfully brings Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, Draco, and their children to life in front of their audience. I know it’ll be a magical experience for all who see it. I just don’t think that the script should have been released to the public, at least not so soon.

I read a lot, but when I read a play, I only do so for one of three reasons: I’m learning how to write plays and need examples, I’m working on a team producing the play, or I’m in a Shakespeare class. I rarely read them for fun, because as many people are realizing after buying “Cursed Child”, reading a play is a vastly different experience from reading a book. Scripts are difficult to read for fun because they don’t provide a complete story.

A play isn’t meant to be read. It’s meant to be performed.

A book is a two-way road, a collaboration between an author and a reader. The author provides everything the reader needs to understand the story. She not only relays dialogue and actions but pulls the reader into the world and the characters’ lives. She gives us backstory and body language, and a backstage pass to the characters’ thoughts, reactions, and feelings. A play’s script doesn’t have that kind of detail. It provides what people say, some information about the scenery, and a few major character actions, and that’s all. But while that’s all that’s in the script, a play is more than just those things. A play isn’t solely a collaboration between writer and reader. It’s a collaboration between – at the minimum – playwright, director, stage manager, lighting designer, costume designer, set designer, props master, actors, stage crew, and audience.

A line of dialogue is more than the words on the page. How the line is delivered — what tone of voice is used, how quickly it’s said, where the emphasis and pauses are, what action is done while saying it, what the character’s body language is while saying it, and how the other characters visibly react while hearing it — are essential to telling the story of a play, and a script doesn’t provide those details. Those details come from the director and actors. A scene is more than the name of a location and how many pieces of furniture are in the room. The feeling of the scene – how old the furniture is, how well the pieces match each other, how tidy the space is, if it’s lit or in shadow, where characters walk and what spots they avoid, what aspects of the space change and when they change – are essential to creating the world of a play, and a script doesn’t provide those details. Those details come from the set, props, and lighting teams.

It takes a literal village to bring a play to life, and by cutting out the middle-men and sending the script directly to the public, that life is diminished. While I can understand the appeal of selling the next Harry Potter story to the public, and can see how good of a marketing decision it is — it’s already the “fastest-selling book this decade” — it rubs me the wrong way that “Cursed Child” was released in print before it really got the chance to come to life as it was meant to. The play had only been out of previews for a day when the script was released.

I don’t sympathize with the people on Twitter giving Rowling a hard time for not giving them a book, or for not writing this script herself. There’s nothing wrong with having a "Harry Potter" play, and besides, Harry Potter is her property, and she can put it in the hands of whatever creator she pleases. As a storyteller, I don’t agree with the decision to release the script. If it gets people interested in seeing and writing plays, as the "Harry Potter" series got so many people interested in reading and writing novels, then great! For now, though, while the script is selling well, the story’s been sold short.