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Letitia Sweitzer

From a post written June 12, 2008, by Peter Hardy:

“More recently we’ve taken a new approach — getting the playwright together with a group of actors, in a private setting, to read and discuss a play. A great deal of care goes into the selection of the actors for these readings — I think that the wrong group of actors can do a playwright more harm than good, leading them to think something’s wrong with the play…But when the right actors — not just talented, but well-cast — are reading a script, the playwright can get a much better idea what’s working and what isn’t. When the readers are bringing your work to life, making your words sound like everything you wanted and more — and then they come to a passage they just can’t make work, chances are you’ve got some rewriting to do.

“After these sessions, we encourage the playwright to do whatever revisions they want to — and then, after a while, we get them together with another group of actors to read the play again…And if that seems to go well, we’ll probably try to put together a staged public reading, to bring an audience into the equation…

We…went through that two-reading process with WEST OF EDEN by Atlanta’s Letitia Sweitzer — but by the time of the second reading, the play (through some very simple and minor changes) had been improved so greatly that it was chosen for the 2008 Playwriting Award.”

(read the whole post online: https://essentialtheatre.com/essential-theatre-playwriting-workshops/)

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