I think the best way to live is to read everything you can get your hands on. I also think it's interesting to read something that was intended to be seen, be it a play or movie script. Plays are one of my favorite things to read. Honestly, I've probably read more plays then I've seen. Clarksville isn't really a theater town, unfortunately. But I don't think I've lost anything by reading them! In fact, I only have something to gain, when I eventually do get to see them performed.
It isn't perfect though. Reading plays sorta feels like reading the outline of a book. The descriptions are stark, with very little metaphor or allusion, the tone is entirely decided by the director and actors and there isn't much exposition. In short, everything I want in a good story.
I think the limitations set by reading plays are often to the story's benefit. When we read anything, there's some sort of "play" happening in our head, in that we imagine the characters doing this, saying that, stealing, crying, dying, whatever. Scripts of plays feel like the grilles, stiles, rails, head, jamb, sill and glass of a window frame. It supports the action, the things you see through a stained window. It gives you enough to focus your view on one particle of the world, but, like all windows, the minute these fragile pieces are removed, you see everything. Or nothing, I suppose if someone decided to take out the window to spackle a wall.
But I think it really comes down to being able to construct a play in your head through reading. Suddenly, you become the director, you have them move and caress in the ways you interpret the dialogue. Nothing gets by you. You're the alpha rooster in this coop. I don't hear King Lear shouting the words "Howl! Howl! Howl!" I hear an old man doing the famed ugly-cry. I hear a meek old man finding everything inside of him spent and his cry echoing from his emptiness. But then I saw this, and thought "well if the Royal Shakespeare Com- Wait! No! Just cause they took the line literally doesn't make it right or wrong. I'm keeping my screaming old man!"
I also think it's fun to remove words out of scripts, though to be fair, I do this with books too. Sometimes, whether it's translation inadequacies or something else, I can't help but feel the need to clip some of the sentences I read in Chekhov. Dude was a master, but I like to imagine how I would say the lines, as a 21st century Tennessean, not a 19th century Russian. Rather than saying "You must!" I could replace it with "You got too." Not grammatically correct, but the vernacular is closer to how I would say it. It brings it home for me.
I guess you could see this as just spinning my wheels about reading books. I mean, you do all of the above when you read a novel or short story. Why bring it into another medium? And to that I say, the greatest cop-out answer there ever was, why not? Dissecting different mediums from the perspective of other forms' rules and benefits, is how you get fresh ideas. You can start a new idea by looking for missing things in the present or go backwards, find the missing pieces, and follow it all the way back to the present and see if it's still missing. I think what I'm getting at is this: limitations should be interrogated not ruinously accepted. So, change the edits of a movie, marks words out of a book, write poems backwards, switch the dialect of a character, take out all the description in a book and just read the dialogue and action. Find something new in established things.
