Questions to Ask While Reading a Play
For a student with an assigned play, a teacher taking a class through Shakespeare or a modern script, or an actor meeting a part before the first rehearsal. A script is a plan for a performance, so the questions keep after what a novel would simply tell you: who is in the room, who can hear, what a body is doing and what a line is holding back. They run in the order a reading does, from the cast list and the stage directions through subtext and delivery to what each scene changes.
Want questions from the whole vault instead? Try the random question generator.
The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Before you read
What does the cast list tell you before anyone speaks?
Why ask it
Read it as a map: who is related to whom, who serves whom, and who is given only a job title where others get a name. A play has no narrator to remind you who someone is, so keep a finger in that page through the first act.
Where and when is the play set, and how much of that would an audience actually see?
Why ask it
The heading may say a drawing room in Norway or a street in Verona, but an audience has no heading to read. Look for how the place reaches them: a set described in the directions, or a character announcing 'Well, this is the Forest of Arden'. Whatever is carried by words alone was left to the audience's imagination on purpose.
Who or what does the title name, and is the play really about them?
Why ask it
Titles in the theater can mislead on purpose. Julius Caesar is killed about halfway through the play that carries his name, and the merchant of Venice is Antonio, not Shylock. Write down your guess before you start and check it at the end of each act: the scene that proves you wrong shows where the play's attention has moved.
Are you reading to write about it, to speak it or to stage it?
Why ask it
The purpose decides what the pencil marks. A student collects quotations and patterns, an actor underlines what the character says, hears and has said about them, and a director circles every problem: the storm, the ghost, the dinner for twelve. Choose one for this pass and read again for the others.
Is it called a comedy, a tragedy, a history or nothing at all, and what does that label promise?
Why ask it
A label is a contract with the audience: a comedy traditionally heads for a wedding or a reunion and a tragedy for a death. Hold the promise in mind and mark the scene where the play starts to strain against it, since that is a good scene to write about.
What kind of stage was this play written for?
Why ask it
Shakespeare's company played on a mostly bare platform, much of the time in daylight, which is why his characters keep telling you it is night or that a wood is all around them. A modern script may assume a fully built kitchen and electric light. Once you know which, you can tell a line that is doing the scenery's job from one that is doing something else.
Which edition or translation are you reading, and what did an editor add?
Why ask it
In most Shakespeare editions the scene locations and a good many stage directions were supplied by later editors, often printed in square brackets, and a translated play is partly the translator's. Check the front matter to see how your edition marks its additions. In a class or a cast, agree on one edition so that line numbers match.
Who is on stage
Who is on stage right now, and who has not spoken for a page?
Why ask it
A silent character disappears from the page and stays in full view in a theater. Go back to the last entrance and exit to check who is still there, then ask what the speakers cannot say with that person standing in the room.
Who is this line really aimed at: the person addressed, someone else in the room, or the audience?
Why ask it
A remark made to one person is often meant to land on another, as when a parent praises one child within earshot of the other. Draw an arrow in the margin from the line to its real target. Where the arrow and the name being addressed disagree, the scene has a second conversation running underneath the first.
Who is overhearing this, and does the speaker know?
Why ask it
Plays are full of people behind curtains, in doorways and in the next room. If the speaker does not know, the listener gains something to use later, so note exactly what they heard. If the speaker does know, reread the speech as a performance put on for that listener.
What does the audience know here that someone on stage does not?
Why ask it
That gap is dramatic irony, and it turns ordinary lines into painful or funny ones: the audience at Romeo and Juliet knows she is alive while he reaches for the poison. List who holds which piece of information at the top of the scene. The tension usually sits with whoever knows least.
When a character is alone on stage, who are they talking to?
Why ask it
It could be the audience, themselves, God or someone absent, and the script rarely says. Read the speech once as a private thought and once as a direct appeal to the people in the seats, and see which makes more sense of its questions. Check too that they really are alone, because some famous solo speeches have another character somewhere on stage.
Why does this character walk in at exactly this moment, and what did they just miss?
Why ask it
An entrance is the playwright's decision about timing, never an accident. Whatever was being said in the seconds before the door opened is what the newcomer does not know, and the people already there now have to decide whether to tell them.
Who leaves, and what does their exit let the others say?
Why ask it
Watch the first line spoken after someone goes: it tends to be the thing that could not be said in front of them. A character who is sent out of the room, as opposed to one who chooses to go, has also just been shown where they rank.
Who never appears but is talked about all the way through?
Why ask it
An absent parent, a dead husband or a visitor who is always about to arrive can steer a whole play from offstage, and in Waiting for Godot the man in the title never comes at all. Collect what each character says about the missing person. The descriptions seldom agree, and each one tells you about its speaker.
Who has the most lines in this scene, and who has the power?
Why ask it
The two are not always one person. Count roughly, then look for who gets obeyed, who gets interrupted and who can end the conversation by standing up. A character with four short lines and all the authority is a gift to an actor and easy for a reader to miss.
Stage directions
What does the opening stage direction ask you to picture before a word is spoken?
Why ask it
Read it slowly and sketch it if that helps: the doors, the furniture, the time of day, who is already there when the lights come up. An audience takes all of that in during the first few seconds, so a reader who skips the italics starts the play behind them.
Which directions describe something an audience could see, and which only a reader gets?
Why ask it
Playwrights such as Shaw and Arthur Miller wrote directions that read like a novel, with a character's history and the writer's opinion of them. A direction like 'she enters carrying a lamp' can be staged as written, but one like 'she has never forgiven him' has to be turned into something visible. For each direction of the second kind, ask what an actor could do to get it across.
What do the lines themselves tell the actors to do?
Why ask it
When someone says 'why do you kneel?' or 'put the knife down', a person on stage has knelt or is holding a knife, even if no direction says so. Older plays, Shakespeare's above all, carry much of their action this way. Mark these implied directions as you go, or half the movement in the scene will pass you by.
What happens during a marked pause or silence, and who breaks it?
Why ask it
The eye slides over the word 'pause' in a fraction of a second, where an audience would have to sit through it. Stop reading for a slow count of three each time and picture the faces. Whoever speaks first afterward has often given something up, or made up their mind.
Which objects does the script insist on, and whose hands are they in?
Why ask it
A prop the directions mention more than once is going to matter, whether it is a letter, a gun or a pair of shoes. Track where it is from scene to scene and who passes it to whom, the way you would follow a clue. In Othello a dropped handkerchief goes from hand to hand and the plot goes with it.
What sounds and lighting does the script call for, and what do they do to the scene?
Why ask it
Thunder, a clock striking, music from another room, a slow fade: these are written in because the playwright wanted the audience's ears or eyes pulled somewhere. Ibsen ends A Doll's House with the sound of a door closing, and that one sound effect is the last event of the play. When you meet a cue, ask what the moment would be without it.
What happens offstage, and why did the playwright keep it out of sight?
Why ask it
Battles, deaths and weddings are often reported by someone who runs in with the news. Sometimes the reason is practical, and sometimes the telling is the point, because the audience gets to watch the listener's face while the news lands. Ask whether the event would be stronger or weaker if you saw it happen.
When a direction tells the actor how to say a line, what other readings does it shut out?
Why ask it
A word like 'coldly' or 'laughing' in brackets is the playwright stepping in, which suggests the line could easily go another way. Try it aloud as written and then the opposite way. If the opposite reading works too, you have found an ambiguity the writer was worried about, and that is worth raising in an essay or a rehearsal.
Under the line
Can you put this speech into plain modern words, one sentence at a time?
Why ask it
Subtext is out of reach until the surface is clear, so do this before the other questions in this group, above all with Shakespeare or a play in translation. Use the glosses in your edition, then say your version aloud to a partner. The sentence you cannot paraphrase is the one to take to your teacher or your director.
What does this character want from the other person in this scene?
Why ask it
Phrase the answer as something to get from the other person: an apology, permission, money, a reason to stay. Actors call it the objective, and it serves readers as well, since a scene where you can name both people's wants explains its own argument. If you are stuck, look at what the character does when they are refused.
What is the character doing to the other person with this line: begging, warning, flattering, stalling?
Why ask it
The words say one thing and the line does another, so write a single verb in the margin beside each speech. 'It's late' can dismiss, invite or accuse. A run of the same verb down the page means the character is stuck on one tactic, and the line where the verb changes is where the scene shifts.
What are they talking about so that they do not have to talk about something else?
Why ask it
Tea, the weather, the train schedule and who left the window open carry a great deal of feeling in plays, Chekhov's especially. Name the subject being avoided, then find the one line where it nearly breaks the surface. Build your reading of the scene around that near miss.
Which question goes unanswered, and what does the dodge tell you?
Why ask it
On stage an unanswered question hangs in the air where everyone can hear it. Mark each one and how it was avoided: a joke, a new subject, a question fired back, an exit. Then check whether anyone in the scene notices, because a dodge that is noticed changes what happens next.
Where might a character be lying, and can the other person tell?
Why ask it
No narrator will step in to say so. Your evidence is what the character says elsewhere, what they say when alone, and what they then do. Decide as well whether the listener believes it, since a lie that is seen through and left unchallenged makes a different scene from one that works.
Which word or image keeps coming back, and who keeps using it?
Why ask it
A repeated word in a play is heard, not seen, and an audience catches it by the third time. In Othello the word 'honest' is pinned on Iago again and again by the very people he is deceiving. Keep a running list inside the back cover with act and scene numbers, and the evidence for an essay on the play's language is gathered before you need it.
What do the others say about this person when they are out of the room, and does it match what you see?
Why ask it
A character on stage is built from three sources: their own words, their actions, and other people's reports of them. Set the reports beside the behavior. Where they disagree, either the reporter has a motive or the character behaves differently depending on who is watching.
What happened between these two before the play began?
Why ask it
A playwright cannot stop for a chapter of history, so the past arrives in scraps: 'not since the funeral', 'you promised me then'. Collect the scraps on one page and separate what both characters agree happened from what only one of them claims. Actors do the same sorting before rehearsal and call the result the given circumstances.
Spoken and staged
How does this speech sound out loud, and where would you have to breathe?
Why ask it
Say it at speaking pace, standing if you can. A long sentence with nowhere to breathe makes the speaker sound driven or panicked, and a string of short ones sounds clipped or controlled. The places where you stumble deserve a second look, because the difficulty is sometimes the character's too.
Which word would you lean on, and what changes if you lean on a different one?
Why ask it
Take a plain line such as 'I didn't ask you to come' and stress each word in turn: every version accuses someone of something different. Do it with one important line per scene. You will find the script leaves more open than the page suggests, which is why two productions of one play can disagree.
Is this in verse or prose, and what changes when a character switches?
Why ask it
In Shakespeare, look at the right-hand edge of the text: lines that stop short of the margin are verse, and a solid block is prose. As a loose pattern, formal and heightened moments get verse while joking, plotting and plain talk get prose, so a switch in the middle of a scene is a signal. Notice too when two speakers share one verse line, which suggests the second comes in without a gap.
How fast does this exchange move, and who cuts in on whom?
Why ask it
Single-line replies traded back and forth play quickly, and long speeches slow the scene down and hand one person the floor. Some modern scripts mark overlapping speech with a slash or a dash, so check the note at the front for what the marks mean. Being interrupted and doing the interrupting are both evidence of who feels entitled to talk.
Where is each person standing, and how far apart are they?
Why ask it
Draw the stage as a rectangle and move coins around it for the characters. Distance is information: two people who stay at opposite ends of a room through a love scene are telling you something the lines may not. Mark who crosses to whom, because the one who crosses the room is often the one who wants something.
What is the character doing with their hands while they say this?
Why ask it
Stage business lets the body carry on with one job while the words attempt another: setting a table, packing a bag, mending a shirt. If the script gives none, invent a task that fits the room and read the scene again. A confession made while peeling potatoes is a different event from one delivered center stage.
If you were casting this part, what would the actor have to be able to do?
Why ask it
Think about demands, not looks: be funny in the first act and frightening in the last, hold a long silence, sing, age twenty years. The list is a quick portrait of the character's range. Note what the script does and does not specify about age or appearance, because the unspecified parts are open to whoever stages it.
How would you stage this moment with two chairs and no budget?
Why ask it
Stripping the scene down shows what it cannot do without. A storm, a ghost or a balcony can each be managed with light, sound or a stepladder, but the scene will still need the one person who must be seen and the one who must not see them. School and fringe productions solve this all the time, so it is a practical question as much as a thought experiment.
Where would an audience laugh, gasp or go quiet?
Why ask it
Comedy read silently and alone can seem flat, so hunt for the laugh lines and say them aloud. Then look at the line that follows each one, which an actor may have to hold back until the house settles. In a serious scene, find the spot where a nervous laugh could break out and ask whether the playwright meant to risk it.
How have two different productions played this scene?
Why ask it
Watch filmed versions after you have read the scene and formed your own picture, not before. Where the two disagree, the script has left a choice open. Where they do the same thing, check the text, because it is probably written in.
Scene by scene
What is different at the end of this scene from the start?
Why ask it
Somebody knows something new, a decision has been made, or the balance between two people has tipped. Write the change in one sentence and you are building a plot outline as you go. If you can find no change, the scene may be there for mood or background, or the shift is small enough to need a second read.
Why does this scene come directly after the one before it?
Why ask it
Playwrights place scenes side by side for contrast as well as sequence. In Macbeth the murder of the king is followed by a drunken porter joking at the gate, and the knocking he answers belongs to both scenes. Ask what the second scene does to the feeling the first one left behind: break it, deepen it or make fun of it.
How much time has passed since the last scene, and how are you told?
Why ask it
It may be in a heading, a change of costume, a line such as 'three weeks and not a word', or nowhere at all. A reader gets the heading and an audience does not, so find the spoken clue as well. A big jump deserves a note on what must have happened in the gap.
What question is the audience waiting to have answered, and when does the answer come?
Why ask it
Most plays hold attention with one large question: will she leave, will he act, will the truth come out. State it early and revise it if the play changes its mind. Where the answer arrives tells you about the structure, since a play that answers well before the end is more interested in the aftermath.
Whose play is this: who makes things happen, and who has to react?
Why ask it
The person who drives the scenes is not always the one the play is named for. Iago has more lines than Othello and starts most of the trouble, yet the fall is Othello's. For each scene, write down whose decision set it going and who had to answer it, then see whether the same two names keep coming up.
Where is the moment after which nothing can go back to how it was?
Why ask it
A letter is read, a secret is said aloud or someone is struck, and the old arrangement is finished. Mark the line. In an essay this gives you the climax with evidence attached, and for an actor it divides the part into the person before and the person after.
What did the first scene plant that the last scene picks up?
Why ask it
When you finish, go straight back and reread the opening few pages. An object, a phrase, a seating arrangement or an offhand joke often returns at the end with its meaning changed. This is a second-reading question, so leave it alone the first time through.
Who has changed by the final scene, and which line would you put beside an early one to show it?
Why ask it
Pair two short quotations from the same character, one from the first act and one from the last, and let the contrast make the case. Look also for the character who has stayed the same while everything around them moved. Some plays are about exactly that refusal.
What is the last thing the audience sees and hears?
Why ask it
The last line and the final stage picture can say different things. Check who is still on stage, who has left, and what the closing direction asks for: a slow fade, a blackout, a curtain on a frozen group. That image is what the audience carries out of the building.
What does the script leave undecided at the end that a production would have to settle?
Why ask it
At the close of Measure for Measure the Duke proposes to Isabella and the text gives her no reply, so each production has to choose what she does. Look for gaps like that: a silence, an exit with no reason given, a look the directions do not describe. Decide how you would play it, and say which earlier lines support you.
What argument is the play having, and which characters take which side?
Why ask it
A theme on stage is rarely a statement. It is a disagreement acted out by people with something to lose: duty against love, the law against mercy. Name the two sides, put each main character under one, and note anyone who changes sides during the action. 'The play sets one against the other and lets neither win cleanly' opens an essay better than a one-word theme does.
What would be lost if this story were told as a novel or a film?
Why ask it
The answer is the reason it was written for a stage: real people sharing the room and the clock with the audience, one fixed space, no close-ups and no way inside a head except through speech. Keep it for the end of a class discussion or a first rehearsal, where it pulls together what everyone noticed about the form.
Reading a script as a performance that has not happened yet
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Setting up the read
Get the words into the air
A script is half of something, and the missing half is voices and bodies. In a class or a cast, hand out parts and read around the room. On your own, mutter the lines, or at least move your lips for the scenes that matter. Even a flat reading aloud shows you who talks most, who is cut off and where the jokes are.
Give the stage directions a voice of their own
In a group reading, make one person responsible for reading every direction aloud, entrances and exits included. Left to themselves, readers skip the italics and jump to the next speech, and the scene loses its doors, its silences and half its cast.
Keep a tally of who is on stage
Write the names on a slip of paper at the top of each scene, add them as they enter and strike them through as they leave. It takes seconds and it answers most of the Who is on stage questions before you have to ask them. For a crowded scene, keep the tally on a sketch of the stage instead, which shows where people are standing as well.
First pass straight through, second pass with a pencil
A play is built to be taken in at one sitting, with the audience unable to turn back a page. Read it once that way if time allows, without stopping to annotate, so you feel where it drags and where it grips. Bring the questions on the second pass, and choose four or five per scene instead of marching through all of them.
Student, teacher or actor: where to spend your time
Writing an essay or studying for an exam
Lean on Who is on stage and Scene by scene, and write about what an audience sees and hears, not what a reader is told. A stage direction, an entrance or a silence can be quoted as evidence just as a line can. How much credit staging and performance history earn differs between courses, so ask your teacher what the rubric rewards before you build an argument on a production you watched.
Leading a class through a scene
Pick one short scene and two groups of questions, then get people out of their seats. Ask three students to stand where the characters would stand, read twenty lines, and stop to ask the rest of the room who has the power and how they can tell. Reading the same lines a second time with one change, such as a different person kept silent on stage, will teach more than a page of notes on dramatic technique.
Preparing a part before rehearsal or an audition
Start with Under the line: what the character wants in each scene, what happened before, and what others say about them. Hold off on fixing how any line should be said, since that gets decided with the other actors in the room. Directors work in different ways, so if you are unsure how much preparation is expected, ask before the first read-through.
When the play is Shakespeare
Put each speech into your own plain words first, using the notes at the foot of the page or facing the text, and only then ask the questions. Read to the punctuation, not to the end of the verse line, and the sense comes through more easily. Remember that bracketed directions are often an editor's guess, which leaves you free to imagine the moment differently.
Habits that come over from reading novels
Hearing only whoever is speaking
In a novel the people who are not mentioned are not there. On a stage they are standing in the light, reacting. Most misreadings of a scene come from forgetting a listener, so before deciding what a speech means, check who else is in earshot.
Taking a speech as the writer's opinion
There is no narrator in most plays, and nobody on stage speaks for the playwright by default. A persuasive speech belongs to a character who wants something from the person hearing it. Ask what the speaker gains before you quote the line as the message of the play.
Waiting for the script to tell you what someone feels
A novelist can write that she was furious. A playwright gives her a line about the dishes and leaves the fury to the actor. When the page seems to hold nothing, go to the questions about what a line is doing and what is being avoided.
Settling on the one right way to play it
A script supports several readings and rules out many more. The useful habit is to say which lines back the choice you prefer and which lines it has trouble with. In a classroom that makes a better argument, and in a rehearsal it keeps you able to change course when a scene partner does something you did not expect.
Letting the film stand in for the play
A screen version cuts lines, moves scenes outdoors and chooses the camera's view for you. It is one production, and a good thing to watch after reading. If you quote it in written work, name it as a production choice and check the line is in your edition.
Once you reach the final page
Write the play in one line per scene
Use your answers to the first Scene by scene question: one sentence for what changed in each scene. Ten or twenty lines give you the whole structure on a single sheet, and the scenes where you wrote the least are the ones to reread.
See it, then go back to one scene
If a production is on near you, or a filmed one is available through your school or library, watch it with the script closed. Afterward reread a single scene that surprised you and find what in the text allowed the choice the company made.
Bring the gaps with you
Keep a short list of what the script would not settle: a motive, a silence, an ending. Those are the best things to carry into a class discussion or a first rehearsal, because they are the points where other people's readings will differ from yours.