ABSTRACT
Do you know how to read a play? Most people don’t, but go at it by reading the words, as in any other kind of reading, and being caught up in the “story.” A director, however, reads a play in a quite different way, paying attention to all the starts and stops, the gaps, the silences, and the bare minimum of description. Furthermore, the director is aware that it is all dramatic action. As a director, all of this sparks your imagination, and what is eventually done by the acting and the design begins to emerge in the mind. The makers of these special stories were called playwrights with the understanding that a play is made, just as other craftsmen make ships (shipwright) or wheels (wheelwright). The product of the playwright or dramatist, to be sure, is not nearly so concrete, for he or she is a conscious dreammaker, as Shakespeare says, who can, with the appropriate use of basic tools, stir up minds and create imaginative flights in others-the audience.
