Script-Reading Sessions

Techies - if you have come to this page while googling for Java Script or HTTP Sessions - please don't read any further ! This post doesn't have anything even closely related to such computer terminologies.

This post is about script-reading sessions that a drama/theatre group usually conducts before kick-starting the practice for the drama. In Bollywood, it is common for a director to conduct such sessions with selected actors and unit members before taking the muhurat shot. In her book Sholay: The Making of a Classic , the author Anupama Chopra gives an interesting account of how the Salim-Javed duo used to narrate the script to the cast of Sholay. Powerful script narration techniques can go a long way in breathing life into every character in the drama.

On Saturday, we (the script-writing team of the dramatics group) conducted a script-reading session of our forthcoming play. It was a culmination of almost two months of on-off-weekend-efforts that the script-writing team had put up - an effort that saw us transform a simple one-paragraph idea (meme) into 15 scenes spanning 26 pages of a Word document.

When we started the script narration, we kept our fingers-crossed. The questions - have we done a good job - repeatedly came to our minds. As the session proceeded, all such apprehensions were put to rest - actors were getting engrossed in the script and were actually relating themselves to the characters that had been etched on paper ! The occasional applauds and appreciations that we received while moving from one scene to the next were a big confidence booster to the writer-personality within us !

The session ended on an upbeat note with actors taking print-outs of the script and having discussions on which roles were the juiciest ones. For me, this will go down as one of those memorable Saturday mornings. The thrill associated with such successful script-reading sessions is equivalent to the thrill that a cricketer gets on smashing a ton in one-day games. It just cannot be described in words !