ABSTRACT
Unlike novels and other forms of prose fiction, plays must be performed in front of audiences to achieve their artistic potential. As Tennessee Williams passionately stated, “a play in a book is only the shadow of a play and not even a clear shadow of it. … The printed script of a play is hardly more than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed” (747). The performative aspect of plays, in that a director, actors, and crew must bring to life the playwright’s vision, separates the theater from other literary forms, which do not require intermediaries between author and reader. Indeed, the necessity of performing theatrical works is encoded etymologically in its terminology: the word theater derives from the Greek word meaning to behold or to view, and the word audience hails from the Latin word meaning listening. When plays are performed in a theater, the audience engages through multiple senses as the story comes alive before them. At the same time, plays include similar narrative and aesthetic elements as fiction and poetry: like fiction, plays need characters, settings, and plots. Like poetry, plays pay detailed attention to language and its oral presentation. Like both poetry and fiction, plays employ symbols and themes to communicate the deeper significance of their storylines.
