A PLAY IS BORN: CAN IT STAND ON ITS FEET?

Noel Coward dashed off “Private Lives” in three weeks and Shakespeare supposedly never blotted out a line. But for most ordinary playwrights, the old maxim applies: Plays aren’t written, they are rewritten.

Novels are rewritten too. But the novelist can tell when he has finally got it right. The playwright doesn’t know how his piece will play until it is actually put on its feet. This can lead to acute gastric distress when opening night is only four weeks away.

Hence the usefulness of the staged reading--a trial performance with absolutely nothing riding on it. I have just spent a couple of weeks assisting at a series of such script-in-hand readings at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., and at the Chocolate Bayou Theater in Houston. My hope was to find out more about what works in the theater, from seeing what didn’t work in these just-hatched plays.

The first discovery was that good drama can’t be pinned down. If a play connects deeply enough with the people it’s about and puts them into some kind of motion, that’s almost enough for a satisfying play, no matter how many dramaturgical rules are violated.

For example, it’s probably safe to say that a play should give a sense of moving forward, avoiding long passages that begin “I remember when we first came to this island” or “I want to say something.”

Yet one of the most alive plays of the summer stopped every 10 minutes or so to allow a character to tell a story about the old days. The stories were so vivid and so humorous that they actually quickened the play’s current, besides helping the listener to understand the family in question. The moral is that a play can move backward, forward or sideways, or even just sit there and shimmer. But something has to be going on--at least in the language.

A play also has to be clear. Not crystal clear--we don’t want everything spelled out--but clear enough so that the audience doesn’t give up on following the thing entirely. And the playwright needs to be clear on what is coming across. An O’Neill playwright put it this way: “I need to know whether what I’ve put down is what they’re actually getting.”

That relates to language too. All of the plays were well-written. But some of them substituted fine writing for dramatic speech. Especially in family plays, there would be passages where, as in soap opera, the characters sat down and explained themselves to each other, rather than behaving towards each other in such a way that the listener could determine for himself what the trouble was.

We do talk a lot about ourselves these days, but we reveal more about ourselves in what we do, whether it’s shooting a rival or setting the table, both of which qualify as dramatic actions. Besides revealing character, they give the actors something to do with their hands, not a small consideration in the theater.

Again, though, vivid speech can almost pass for action, and one of the best plays seen was set in a big-city neighborhood, where everybody talked in “arias” of loopy, hard-nosed poetry. Another playwright knew how to write full scenes with the barest of language lines: another kind of eloquence. Happy the playwright who has a voice--as long as he doesn’t insist that all his characters talk in it. (We also saw examples of that.)

Every play had at least one character who existed beyond his function in the play--a person you could imagine meeting on the street. There were also characters who seemed to be present only to volunteer information or to elicit it from somebody else. There were generic characters whom the playwright hadn’t managed to particularize (a defect sometimes covered by clever acting) and there were characters so particular that one didn’t know what to make of them. These often turned out to be transcripts of people in the playwright’s life--people he knew so well that he assumed the audience would automatically recognize what they were up to. If you are going to put your mother in a play, it helps to have some distance on her.

Then there were the characters who didn’t appear in the play but who kept being talked about, to the point where you wanted to see them. One play concerned two cousins on the run from the sheriff, one a good guy, one a bad guy. We saw the first cousin but had to visualize the second for ourselves. Frustrating! On the other hand, who wants to see Godot?

The most interesting characters underwent a change during the course of the play--at least a change in the viewer’s mind. One character started out as a cynical womanizer, but we came to see that he could be tender with the right woman, not the play’s hip heroine. Another character, supposedly a con artist, surprised us by making an excellent argument for heisting his sister’s piano.

As in real life, we were able to incorporate these surprises into our assessment of who this character was, giving us a new respect for his complexity. That’s not the same as being totally baffled by a change in a character’s behavior, to the point where you simply stopped believing in him.

One play was actually built on its characters’ behaving in strange ways. An old couple come home to find that two young men have broken into their house. The old couple ask the boys if they want coffee. A highway patrolman comes in search of the young men--and suddenly confesses that what he really wants to do is be a stand-up comic.

The upshot of the play was that, in life, things don’t always add up. As Pinter and Shepard have proved, they don’t have to add up on stage either. But they should make some kind of symbolic sense. We could see an older couple “adopting” two thieves as substitute children. But the stand-up cop was hard to connect to anything.

Still, the boldness and the simplicity of this play’s central situation gave it a life that some better-aligned scripts didn’t have--more proof that an intense imagination is one of the playwright’s most useful gifts. Proof, too, perhaps, that the new drama is sometimes the old melodrama with an absurdist face.

Time and again, actors would bring lines to life that had seemed empty on paper. A 12-year-old echoes his mother’s request that he be home for supper at 6 with--”Six?” In the script, it had seemed a mere repetition. The actor, well over 12 years old, read it with intense indignation: You expect a kid my age to be home at 6 ? One saw both the kid and the problem that the mother was having with him. Had the playwright planned the effect, or was the actor doing his work for him? You couldn’t honestly say.

That’s the excitement of the theater, the factor that makes every production of a play, however old, a new one. But with an untried text the really conscientious actor tries not to make too many discoveries on his own. The point is to show the playwright what he has put down, not to finesse the contradictions in his characters or to cover the holes in his plot.

But, actors being actors, they always give a good show, even when sitting in a half-circle with scripts in their hands. It’s amazing what an effective prop a rolled-up script can be, especially when the actor has already half-memorized it.

It’s also amazing how easily the viewer can enter the world of a play, even when it’s only being “read.” Audiences at the Chocolate Bayou Theater also had the fun of second-guessing the play immediately after the reading, something that is left until the morning after at the O’Neill. Audiences can’t always pinpoint the problem with a particular scene, but they know where they lost interest and what wasn’t clear, and a playwright can use that.

In the end, a bad play can’t be rewritten into a good one. Some of the plays I saw existed simply to help the author to get to his next one. Others will have a future. None will be the worse for its test shot, unless the author gets too confused by all the advice that comes with it. (Good playwrights know how to filter out these helpful comments.)

As for the critic looking for ground rules, there’s only this: If you can hold them for two hours, it’s a play.