What is the purpose of a stage direction? These italicized lines
written in between the lines of spoken dialogue tell us a great
deal of information about a play's genre, mood, tone, visual
setting, cast of characters, and more. Yet generations of actors
have been taught to cross these words out as records of previous
performances or signs of overly controlling playwrights, while
scholars have either treated them as problems to be solved or as
silent lines of dialogue. Stage directions can be all of these
things, and yet there are examples from over one-hundred years of
American playwriting that show that stage directions can also be so
much more. The Lines Between the Lines focuses on how playwrights
have written stage directions that engage readers, production team
members, and scholars in a process of embodied creation in order to
determine meaning. Author Bess Rowen calls the products of this
method 'affective stage directions' because they reach out from the
page and affect the bodies of those who encounter them. Affective
stage directions do not tell a reader or production team what a
given moment looks like, but rather how a moment feels. In this
way, these stage directions provide playgrounds for individual
readers or production teams to make sense of a given moment in a
play based on their own individual cultural experience, geographic
location, and identity-markers. Affective stage directions enable
us to check our assumptions about what kinds of bodies are
represented on stage, allowing for a greater multitude of voices
and kinds of embodied identity to make their own interpretations of
a play while still following the text exactly. The tools provided
in this book are as useful for the theater scholar as they are for
the theater audience member, casting director, and actor. Each
chapter covers a different function of stage directions (spoken,
affective, choreographic, multivalent, impossible) and looks at it
through a different practical lens (focusing on actors, directors,
designers, dramaturgs, and readers). Every embodied person will
have a slightly different understanding of affective stage
directions, and it is precisely this diversity that makes these
stage directions crucial to understanding theater in our time.
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