Dramaturg's Checklist for Reading a New Script: 18 Questions to Ask

A new script arrives as a PDF at eleven at night, and by page four you already have opinions. That is fine. Opinions are cheap and unavoidable. What a writer needs back from a dramaturg is something more useful: a reading that can point to the page, the scene, the line where the play tightens or slackens. The checklist below is built for the second read — the pass where you stop being an audience member and start being a colleague.

Work through it scene by scene, pencil in hand, rather than trying to answer everything about the whole script at once. Most answers live in the transitions. A play rarely fails because of its premise; it fails because the scene between two good scenes has nothing to do.

One clean read before the questions

Read the script once straight through without stopping, and keep a separate sheet beside you. Mark three things only: where you got bored, where you laughed or leaned in, and where you had to re-read a line to understand it. Those marks are your data. They are not yet your notes, but they are the honest record of what the play does to a willing stranger, and they will keep you from rewriting the script in your head before you have understood it.

Then go back scene by scene. The eighteen questions below are ordered from the biggest structural pressure down to practical matters of staging.

Structure: does each scene earn its place?

• 1. In one sentence, what does the protagonist want in this scene, and who or what is in the way? If you cannot answer in a sentence, the scene may be doing two jobs badly.
• 2. Does the scene end somewhere different from where it began? A turn can be quiet: a lie exposed, an invitation refused, a key produced, a name finally spoken.
• 3. If you cut the scene, what breaks? "Nothing, but it is the only time we see her alone" is a real answer. "Nothing" on its own is a problem.
• 4. Where does the play actually start? Compare page one with page twelve. The true opening is often the moment a character can no longer avoid a decision.
• 5. What is the clock? Why tonight and not last year? A wedding tomorrow, an eviction on Friday, a last train, a visiting hour that ends.

Write your answers in the margin next to the scene, not in a summary at the end. A note that says "pages 34–38: she wants the money, he wants to be forgiven, nobody moves" is worth more to a writer than a paragraph of general praise.

Character logic: would an actor defend this?

• 6. Does each character want something in every scene, including the quiet ones? The character who wants nothing is the one the audience stops watching.
• 7. Do people act from their own logic or from the plot's convenience? Test it by imagining the actor's question: "Why do I say this now?" If the only honest answer is "because the play needs it," flag it.
• 8. Who knows what, and when? Track information across the whole script. Convenient ignorance — a character who never mentions the letter because act two requires it — is the most common crack in an otherwise solid draft.
• 9. Do the characters change tactics, or repeat one at increasing volume? Two people shouting the same accusation twice is one scene, not two.
• 10. Where is the pressure coming from? A person, a system, an institution, a debt. The strongest plays usually have two sources pressing at once, so that escaping one means walking into the other.

Thematic clarity: what is the play arguing?

• 11. What question does the play keep asking? Try to state it without abstract nouns. Not "the nature of grief" but "is it disloyal to laugh a week after a funeral?"
• 12. Where does the play argue with itself? Find the character who has the best case against the writer's sympathy. If that voice is a straw man, the theme will land as a lecture.
• 13. Does the ending answer, complicate, or merely stop? Endings that resolve the plot while ignoring the question leave an audience cold even as they applaud.

Theme in draft scripts is usually not missing; it is over-explained. If a character says the thing the play is about, mark the line. Nine times out of ten the photograph, the bruise or the unpaid bill has already said it better.

Voice, language and silence

• 14. Cover the character names. Can you tell who is speaking? Not through catchphrases, but through rhythm, vocabulary and preoccupation.
• 15. Does the dialogue trust silence? Mark every line that explains what the previous line already showed. Those are usually the first cuts, and the writer will often agree.

Producibility: can this be built?

Read for the theatre you are reading for. A script can be beautiful and still be wrong for a venue with one technician and a four-metre ceiling, and it is kinder to say so early than to let a writer fall in love with a production that will never happen.

• 16. What is the cast size, and does doubling work? Do the smaller parts carry weight, or are they functional roles that exist to deliver information?
• 17. What does the set have to do? Count the locations and separate demands from suggestions. Ask what survives in a black box with four chairs and a door.
• 18. Does it fit a real slot? Running time, interval, age range of the cast, touring weight, and whether the play would work for the audience the season is actually trying to reach.

Turning the answers into notes

Keep the feedback to a page. Open with what the play does well, and be specific — not "strong characters" but "the brother's third scene, where he lies about the job and then asks for sugar." Then choose the two or three questions that matter most, and ask them rather than answering them.

"On page 41 I lost track of why she stays. What is she afraid of losing if she leaves?"

That sentence sends a writer back to the desk with something to solve. "Cut the scene" sends them to the defensive. Where you have craft suggestions, number them by page so the writer can find them without hunting. And say plainly which notes belong to this draft and which can wait for the next one — most scripts cannot absorb everything at once, and a good reader knows the difference between a flaw and a stage the play has to pass through.

Finally, keep your marked-up copy. When the next draft arrives, the most useful thing you can do is return to your own margins and check which questions have been answered, which have moved, and which are still sitting quietly on the same page.

Photo: 6072518 / Pixabay