Adrien-Alice Hansel has been the literary manager at Actors Theatre since March 2004. This piece originally appeared in Inside Actors in September 2005.

As I write in early August, the literary office is busily reading away getting ready for Humana 2006. Since the first Great American Play Festival in 1976 (renamed Humana Festival of New American Plays two years later), the Actors Theatre literary office has read in excess of 200,000 plays. These days we read roughly 700 full-length plays a year. The literary staff hunt high and low for the best plays: we attend readings all over the country, chat up agents, e-mail playwrights we’re interested in and read hundreds of ten-page samples of plays by writers who are new to us. Once we’ve read the plays, we write up an evaluation, and decide whether to return the play — encouraging the writers of compelling pieces to continue to send us their work — or to send it on to another reader. We pass the promising pieces around the theatre, where they’re read and discussed several more times, until we’ve whittled our list down to the five plays you’ll see this spring.

So. When I sit down with a play, what am I looking for? It’s a tricky proposition, because the writer has spent some real time making decisions about his or her characters, the way the story unfolds, the interplay between setting, theme and plot, where I’ll only spend an hour and a half with it. This is my chance to enter a world and to make sure that I see it as it could be on stage.

Here are my ground rules:

Assume the play is perfect. Try to enter the play on its own terms. A good play, I’ve found, will teach me how to read it. Time may unfold in a peculiar way, or characters may use language differently, but a good play will let the rules of its world unfold.

So, what works? When I write up my evaluations, the first thing I address is what I loved (or even liked) about the piece — the characters are impossibly charming, I was stunned by the language, the plot kept unfolding in intriguing ways.

And how does it work? Then I step back and take a look at how the whole play fits together: what’s the basic question that the playwright is examining? How do the characters, plot, language and style of the play feed into that question? What’s the playwright trying to do?

Sometimes, the things that don’t seem to fit are the best clues to what the playwright is trying to get at. Why does Queen Victoria suddenly show up in the middle of a contemporary family drama? Why does time run backwards in the first act? Crack that, and suddenly the universe opens up. Ignore it, or judge it, before considering it and you’ll never get inside the play.

Remembering the play is perfectly itself, what questions am I left with? Then I assume that I’m wrong about everything I don’t understand: if the characters feel thin to me, why might the writer choose to do that? Is the writer commenting on the world of these characters? Does something else in the play — the language or the conflict — support this new view? How might this play be working that I don’t expect?

Then, make a judgment. Having identified what the play is setting out to do, how well does it do it? And then, how interesting is its ambition? Is it a solid play I don’t respond to? A not-quite successful play that I’m head over heels for? Does it get my blood pumping? Am I thinking about it a few days later? Is there something unavoidably true here?

It’s incredibly exciting to read the work of so many talented writers, entering different worldviews, learning about different facets of the human experience. Every day, I get to identify with the stories of people who live vastly different lives than I do, and my heart and mind are incrementally changed.

Then we invite you to join us in a darkened theater, where suddenly I learn the play in a whole new way — a breathing, complex experiment in collective imagination. I hope you’ll join me.