Lost in the Spotlight: Students vs. The Play

Students opening a play for the first time often feel like they’ve arrived late to a party where everyone else already knows the inside jokes. One of the first hurdles, as Francis Hodge would gently point out, is misunderstanding the given circumstances, which are not optional trivia but the basic facts of the world everyone is stuck in. Students tend to skim past time, place, relationships, and social rules as if those elements will politely announce themselves later, but, unfortunately for students, they do not. Instead, readers wonder why characters are behaving so strangely, completely missing that it is midnight, or wartime, or socially illegal to say what everyone is thinking. Without paying attention to these circumstances, students imagine the play happening in a vague, timeless fog, possibly furnished with beanbags. This leads to serious confusion when characters react strongly to events the student has mentally downgraded to “minor.” A duel, a scandal, or an inheritance may seem significant only if you realize what it means in that world. Without that grounding, students blame the playwright for being exaggerated instead of noticing that the situation itself is fundamental for the work. The play, meanwhile, sits patiently, waiting to be read with its context intact. It is not offended, just disappointed.

Another cheerful obstacle is dialogue. Students treat dialogue as polite conversation rather than purposeful action. Hodge reminds us that dialogue in a play is not there to share thoughts but to do things, yet students read it as if everyone is chatting to pass the time. They focus on what characters say instead of what they are trying to accomplish by saying it. A threat becomes “mean language,” a persuasion attempt becomes “long and boring,” and an emotional dodge becomes “confusing writing.” Because students are not using theory explicitly, they default to everyday conversation rules, which are completely unhelpful here. In real life, people ramble; in plays, they maneuver. Every line is aimed at someone, even when it pretends not to be. When students ignore this, scenes feel repetitive, and characters seem oddly obsessed with the same topics. The truth is that the characters are pushing, blocking, seducing, defending, and escaping—all through words. Once students realize that dialogue is actually action, the play suddenly becomes much livelier. Until then, it sounds like a transcript of an awkward dinner.

Dramatic action itself is another concept students struggle with, especially once they discover that dramatic action is not action, but a force that pushes characters into performing. As Francis Hodge explains, dramatic action often falls into recognizable modes—farcical, melodramatic, tragic, and comedic—but students tend to lump everything into a single category labeled “overreacting.” Farcical dramatic action, with its exaggeration and rapid misunderstandings, is often mistaken for stupidity rather than intention, leading students to ask why the characters do not simply “talk it out.” Melodramatic dramatic action, which intensifies emotions that eventually lead to extreme choices, is dismissed as unrealistic, despite the fact that students themselves have used their phones to exchange messages of this kind over very small inconveniences affecting them. Tragic dramatic action is also troubling because characters pursue their own peril with terrifying commitment, and students are uncomfortable watching people refuse to back down when clearly warned. However, comedic dramatic action causes the most confusion of all because students assume comedy means jokes, not purposeful behavior that attempts to solve a problem. They miss that comedy often comes from characters trying very hard to succeed and failing in very specific ways. Because students are not trained to identify these modes, they expect to understand dramatic actions following emotional rules applied to characters. Ironically, once students understand that dramatic actions are play forces, like the rules in a sport, not a behavior caused by emotions of a character, the play suddenly feels more organized—and much more fun to read.

The trouble deepens when students forget that plays, being a literary genre, have their own aesthetics. Approaching a dramatic text as if it were a narrative is going to end up in frustration: What is the setting in a play? Is it the physical arrangement of the stage or the information conveyed as characters speak? Using literary criticism approaches is equally problematic. Of course a reader can use New Historicism, psychological perspectives, or feminist criticism to approach a play, but, unfortunately, as these literary tools guide the reading to a certain theoretical or ideological framework, they do nothing to explain the play as a literary text different from a poem or a novel. Reading a play this way makes students miss four fifths of the play and all of its dramatic tension. The play-script, again, waits patiently to be seen for what it actually is.

Imagine a student named Alex reading a play for class while eating cereal and checking messages. Alex concludes that the characters have “unclear motivations” and that the dialogue is “weirdly repetitive.” When asked about the given circumstances, Alex shrugs and says, “I think it’s just people talking.” Alex has not noticed that the characters are bound by social rules, forced by dictinct drives outside their control, and using dialogue like strategic weaponry. When the instructor suggests reading the play aloud, Alex laughs in disbelief but later tries it—and suddenly hears threats, pleas, and evasions hiding in plain sight: a passageway into elusive dramatic actions! Eventually, the cereal goes soggy, the phone is silenced, and the play becomes suspiciously interesting. The improvement is noted. Somehow, dramatic action manifests clearly, dialogue sharpens, and the given circumstances finally make sense.