You're having a new play read, or part of a new play. It's a script. What is a script but a tool used by artists who make theatre or film. The artists we should always consider first, middle and last as we go about our planning are of course the actors.
Because actors are reading your script aloud rather than performing the play with full production value, the reading by definition cuts many of your creative collaborators out of the equation. Set designer? Sorry. Lighting? Nope. Composer. Hell, no. Director? Not really, if we're honest. The direction of readings of new work is actually more like a hybrid of casting and stage management.
Essentially, 90% of readings -- regardless of whether they're private, in a writers workshop or public -- are carried entirely by the actors who read your dialogue aloud.
If you really want to make some judgments as to what works and what does not (yet), what's confusing vs. boring vs. just right, you need to carefully (surgically) remove anything that threatens to get in the way of actors understanding your intention, beat by beat.
Let's say you're like me and you tend to write longhand, even edit typed pages longhand, sometimes you even pull out a pair of scissors and a stapler when you're really on a roll... desperate to get down the major building blocks as quickly as you imagine them. In that case, you may spend days if not weeks reading your play off of a pile of pages that aren't even all the same size. See the arrows in the image at the top of this post for a mild example of shorthand/notes/diagrams that can be super helpful to you in your writing process but will actually be destructive should anyone else be asked to read from top to bottom and figure out how it goes.
Everyone understands that to get the best reading out of your actors, you need to have typed up your pages in standard script format.
Every time an actor speaks a word of dialogue that is either not what you intended or not as you intended, you can think of it as a brick being tossed into the middle of the road, the road that connects your intention to your audience. (And here I don't mean your eventual audience for the play as produced. I mean the audience gathered for the reading, even if that audience is six of your most trusted friends and colleagues.)
And every time the reading of a scene has to be paused because suddenly there's confusion about what is to be said or who is meant to say it, there's another brick.
There's much you can do to clarify things for any actor who happens to pick up a page of your script. And you should prep your script for the unlikely event of you being struck by lightening en route to the theatre or rehearsal room and thereby missing the actual read.
Anything that requires you to explain how something is meant to go may not necessarily be a weakness in a finished play but it most definitely will be for a reading. In this sense, it's helpful to think of yourself as the stage manager of your own reading. Why give yourself a pass on not closing up every little gap in clarity? By doing so, you really only handicap your work and ultimately you're going to be the person most distressed by the confusion.
Here's a list of some of the most common minor "bricks" I see too many playwrights allowing into their scripts.
- the absence of page numbers
- one character name, two spellings
- character name at bottom of page, line of dialogue after page break
- sloppy or vague punctuation
- stage directions that should not be read aloud yet not carefully crossed out.
- stage directions where parentheticals should appear and vice versa
- unfinished lines of dialogue with bracketed notes pointing to some future writing not yet worked through
- undecided choices vis a vis who reads what aloud
- unanswered questions re: the precise start and stop of the section being read
You may look at this list and have a negative reaction because of course several of the areas of production covered by a number of these are absolutely not the responsibility of the playwright when a play is being rehearsed for performance.
But here's the thing. No one else -- stage manager, producer, director, designers, actors -- can yet possibly have an understanding of the dramatic throughline of your piece that even remotely approaches that of the writer when the work is new. You may wish you didn't have to go through every line of stage direction to determine which word (or in some instances, letter) should be crossed out, but before a cast and director have actually spent weeks together in a rehearsal room, the ideal flow of the work from start to finish only lives within you.
Accept and embrace the responsibility to be the steward of every detail until the work is ready for others to step into their full production roles.
When asking people to give up an afternoon or an evening in order to help you shape your new play, try not to welcome them into the experience with a request for a volunteer to do this or that right now. Work it all out ahead of time and your odds of collecting valid feedback based on the play you hoped to write increases.