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By MARGARET WEITZMANN What is Readers Theater? How “different” is it? What does a Readers Thea ter production look like? Is it “theater,” or isn’t it? Readers theater, we might say, is to “traditional” theater what oratorio is to opera. While presented on stage, with actors taking, parts and with a story or theme spelled out, oratorio and readers theater are not “staged” — costumed, de corated, lighted and “acted out.” The analogy is a goor one except for one factor: only an insignificant body of lterature has actually been written for readers theater as compared with the great body of music for the oratorio. This is not because history works backward in the case of the theater. In its in fancy theater was not a “stag ed” phenomenon. It sprang from religious ritual, a com bination of the spoken word with music and dance; and, in the sense that readers theatre tends to dispense with the decor which defines theater to most of us, it is a return to the roots of drama rather than a new thing, New Things It is, however, a new thing too. Another impulse which feeds the demand for readers theater is a rediscovered and widespread enthusiasm for read ing out loud. The first efforts in what we might consider read ers theater, therefore, were sim ply public readings. Paradoxi cally enough they coincided, not with a dearth of readers and reading material such as existed in the Middle Ages, but with the growth of a mass market for literature, for the first time in the world’s history, in the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain drew crowds to their readings. In our own century we have seen public readings by ‘T.' 8. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dam Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, various actors who have pre sented themselves as Dickens, Twain and Thomas reading Dic kens, Twain and Thomas. Why have people flocked to hear them? Not just because they represented Literature and Cul ture. They were also Theater. These men had the gift of dra matizing whatever they read.. .And the public loved it. They also loved Charles Laughton’s “Quartet” reading Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell.” Readers theater versions of Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, An gel,” the plays of Christopher Fry, Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood” and “In Country Sleep” — never smash box of fice in the Broadway sense — have still breathed great draughts of fresh air into other wise stale seasons over the past 10 years. As an ultimate demon stration of readers theater’s ap peal we can point to the enor mous and growing sale of re cords — Shakespeare, Thomas, Sitwell’s “Facade,” Fry’s “The Lady’s Not for Burning,’ Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell,’ — and many, many more, Kind of Drama What sort of drama best lends itself to readers theater? Much’ theatrical literature is simply’ “inappropriate for readers thea tre, even when it makes ex cellent reading. When action cannot be dispensed with — and it is often indispensible — the play must be staged; seen, we might say, to be believed. But in a surprising number of plays the action can be implied, sketched in, suggested without an actor’s moving from his place. The plays of Shaw, Moliere and Racine, the English Restoration comedies, Goethe's and Schiller’s verse plays, the Greek tragedies — all these are adventures in ideas, in hearing and understanding almost more than in seeing. Two features of readers!
Newspaper Details
Potsdam Courier and Freeman
Potsdam, New York, US
Thu, Feb 14, 1963
Page 9
Full Page
Clipped by
Marie T.
USA 31 Jan 2026
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