The Beaver Coat: Drama and Theater

At this point, we've watched a couple plays and read many more. As we discussed the difference in drama and theater in our last class, I felt like now was a good time to bring up differences in watching a play and reading a play, and why ultimately I believe reading a play is certainly not the best way to experience one.

In most of the plays we've read, hardly anything except dialogue is mentioned. With nothing much else to go on, reading a play feels a lot like looking at a template. By reading a play we can understand its intentions, but so much is lost when a play isn't viewed. Certain character's tones can be misinterpreted, I know on more than one occasion in this and other classes I've been totally wrong about how a character was approaching a situation just because I didn't pick it up from how it was presented in the play. The Beaver Coat is the first play to actually mitigate things like this, being very descriptive in the way people look, act, and speak.

When I say much is lost in only reading a play, I don't just mean better visualizing what's occurring, but the play's character. While that in itself might not be relevant to analysis in our class, it doesn't change the fact that some of my favorite parts from the plays we've watched have been things that were never explicitly mentioned in text alone. In The Venetian Twins, my favorite thing is when Tanino (Zanetto?) is giving an aside and one of the servants squints over his shoulder to try to see who he's talking to. In The Broken Jug, Judge Adam breaking his stick (it just snaps in half as he's banging it, it doesn't look like it was even intentional) was one of the few things that made me laugh.

In the end I believe it is unfortunate that more of these plays aren't watched instead of read, as they were intended.