The Stage(s).

I go through stages when it comes to reading. Sometimes, I'm normal, and I can read a play or a novel and have the same amount of interest in either of them, finish them, and read something else. Sometimes, I lean more towards novels, and the thought of reading a play makes me nauseous or I get bored with keeping track of the different characters in my head and I end up wondering what it is I like about theatre in the first place, or why I persistently write the very shit I am so furious with at that moment. Other times, it is the opposite. I develop some sort of novel-ADD, prohibiting me from turning through anything that isn't clearly marked with character names or italicized text to tell me specifically what's going on. And then I remember. A couple weeks ago, one of my teachers said, "Plays are meant to be heard, not read." While I believe that's true, I also think that there is something incredible about the ability of a person (albeit a theatrical person) to pick up a dramatic text, read through it, and create a production in your head. I suppose a similar phenomenon occurs when you read a novel - you imagine what the characters look like, the color of their bedroom, etc. - but it's not the same. I believe (and it's sort of crazy) that when a playwright creates a play, the characters are thrown into existence, and that they are spiritual beings (read: ghosts), floating around, waiting to "possess" an actor; that everything I am reading was said by this person who exists in and of this play, specifically and solely. Where the play begins and ends, so does his life. All writers use things from their lives or the lives of others in creating their stories. It is a fact that there is no such thing as an original idea, just original ways of expressing said idea and, therefore, each and every event is a haunted image of something previously recognizable. If not, how would we connect, how would we relate? We would be alienated, in the Brechtian sense of the word, from the action onstage, much as we are in a great deal of musical theatre. The theatre is an elevated, modernized method of storytelling - in place of cave paintings, we have scenery; instead of an old man by the fire, we have me and you and every other actor in the world. This is the essence of my belief in the power of theatre to reach people, to change things, to speak. But, I digress. The point of all of this rambling is to simply say that, right now, the thought of reading a novel is highly unappetizing, despite the fact that I just spent $17 on a 562 page novel that will find a nice, comfortable home in the bottom of my desk drawer under a copy of Love! Valour! Compassion!.