Sarah Ruhl
one hundred essays I don't have time to write*
*Please consider these essays as starting points. Consider them starting points for someone else to finish.
27. Reading aloud
Reading was once something we always did out loud, and to someone. Solitary silent reading came into vogue around the time of Augustine when privacy was invented. Augustine gives an account of Ambrose reading to himself, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” It must have seemed terribly antisocial, even for a monk. Now all of our acts of reading and writing are instantly transmittable, in silence. In the digital age, we read and digest texts and silently text back, never having read them out loud.Theater in its most basic form is a kind of reading aloud. When children are small we tell them to make a circle and we read to them. When they grow up we tell them to sit in a corner and read to themselves. In the theater, we ask adults to be children again, to sit in a circle and be read to.
I enjoy the sensation of being read to in a theater as opposed to watching people behave behind glass. Sometimes, however, because of the aesthetic of a particular production, I feel as though I am watching people behind a pane of glass.
I have occasionally watched my own plays in the sound booth where there actually is a pane of glass between me and the production. When I do this, I am turned suddenly into an observer-criminal. Putting glass between me and them almost seems to imply the possibility of violence.
So to break the fourth wall, or the implied wall of glass, for the actor to read to, to speak to, to sing to the audience, is an ancient form of communication, which now seems almost revolutionary. Don’t make a wall of glass between your play and the people watching. Don’t forget they were once children, who enjoyed being read to, or sung to sleep.