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From
Issue #1, Summer 2003
A Matter of Opinion
WHAT IS READERS THEATRE?
In all of its variety
of presentation Readers Theatre has been called many things: Interpreters
Theatre, Chamber Theatre, Platform Theatre, Concert Reading, Staged Reading,
Drama of the Living Voice and (my favorite) Theatre of the Mind ...Theatre
of the Imagination. It is called Readers Theatre by most. The Institute
for Readers Theatre defines it as "a combination of oral interpretation
and conventional theatre utilizing two or more readers ... to communicate
the full intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic content of the literature
to an audience". This Theatre of the Mind draws on all types of literature
including plays, short stories, poems, letters, novels, essays, diaries,
newspaper columns and even comic strips. Radio drama - in its insistence
on audience participation through the imagination - is a close relative
and progenitor of modern Readers Theatre.
THEATRE OF THE
MIND
From the
audience's standpoint, the Readers Theatre experience is one of
involvement. The audience participates with its imagination to
provide the sets, costumes, and the props. Voice actors,
when well-rehearsed, cause an audience to experience literature as
they, the actors, experience it.
IN THE
BEGINNING
In the early days of Readers Theatre, the presentations were
usually quite formal, staged with stools and reading stands, often
in dinner jackets and floor-length dresses. Now Readers Theatre in
its more ambitious forms can sometimes involve memorization and
enhancements with costumes, special lighting, sound effects, and
music. Most
often, though, it is seen with actors dressed in black and seated
on simple stools behind unobtrusive reading stands.
READERS
THEATRE ON BROADWAY
Lending
status and respect to the form, The New York Drama Quartet, a
readers theater ensemble created in the early 1950's by Charles
Laughton, with Agnes
Moorehead, Charles Boyer and Sir Cedric Hardwicke toured the US to
exceptional acclaim with hundreds of performances of Don
Juan In Hell from Shaw's Man and Superman.
Subsequently, Broadway saw its share of this exciting genre in
productions of more traditional theatre pieces including Spoon
River Anthology, and Brecht on Brecht. The works
of Pinter and Beckett have been produced as Readers Theatre as has
the voice poem Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.
A.R.Gurney's well-known hit Love Letters is pure readers
theater. Thornton Wilder's Our Town, though rarely seen as
Readers Theater, is ideally structured for that style of
production.
TODAY, Readers Theater is
frequently used as a teaching tool at all levels of education.
Religious RT ensembles are growing in number with stunning success
adapting scriptural and liturgical materials. There is a growing
move toward reestablishing this performance technique as a viable
theater form in and of itself.
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