How to Read Plays as an Actor (and Build Your List of Roles)

Every acting teacher tells you to read plays. So you buy a stack, read one on the train, enjoy it, and a month later you can’t remember who the second lead was or whether there was a part in it for you. The stack sits on the shelf and quietly makes you feel guilty.

Then an audition notice asks for a contemporary comedic monologue, or a director says “we’re doing a Chekhov in the spring, come in for it,” and you realize all that reading left you with nothing you can use. You read plays the way you read novels: for the story, and then you let them go.

The short version: read plays as a working actor, not as a reader. Read each one in a sitting, out loud where you can, then write five short lines about it before you close the book. Pay attention to what other characters say about the people in it, because that’s where roles hide. Keep everything in one running list of roles, scenes, and speeches you could play. And get your plays free, legally, from the places listed below. A modest habit kept for a year beats a heroic reading list abandoned in March.

Why reading plays is part of the job

Reading plays is how you learn what theater is made of. You start to recognize how a playwright builds a scene, where the turns land, and how a small part can carry a big moment. You also get faster at the job you’ll do in every audition room: picking up pages you’ve never seen and understanding them quickly. Our guide to cold reading for auditions covers that skill on its own.

There’s a practical reason too. The actor who has read widely walks into a general audition with three monologues that suit them, knows which plays a local company might program, and can talk to a director about the work. The actor who hasn’t is searching “monologues for women in their twenties” the night before.

And reading builds a sense of your own type. After a few dozen plays, you notice which parts you keep wanting to say out loud. That’s information. It tells you where you’re likely to be cast now and which roles to grow toward.

Read it in one sitting, the way it will be heard

Most full-length plays are written to be taken in at one go, in a single evening. Read them that way when you can. Stopping after every scene breaks the rhythm the playwright built, and you lose the feeling of how the story gathers speed toward the end.

Read the first time for pleasure. Craig Mason at Theatrefolk recommends starting with a pleasure read of the whole play, the first of three reads before you decide anything about a character, and that’s the right first read for a play you’re not yet cast in, too. Don’t stop to look things up. Don’t mark anything. Just find out what happens.

Read some of it out loud. You don’t need to perform it. Mumbling a speech under your breath shows you how it sits in the mouth: where the breaths go, which words are hard to get around, which lines are funnier spoken than they looked on the page. Plays are scores for voices, and silent reading only tells you half of it.

Read the stage directions, but don’t let them take over. Some playwrights write very few, some write pages. Notice what they tell you about the world and the rhythm, and save the details for when you’re actually working on the play.

Keep a five-line log, not a full analysis

The reason plays disappear from memory is that most actors keep no record, or try to keep a perfect one and give up. Five lines is enough, written right after you finish, while the play is still warm:

• Title, playwright, and the year it was first performed, so you can place it later.
• One sentence on what the play is about, in your own words, not the back-cover blurb.
• The role or roles you could play now, and one you could play in ten years, each with one thing other characters say about them.
• One speech worth looking at as a monologue, with the act and scene so you can find it again.
• One two-person scene you’d like to work on in class, with who you’d want to read it with.

That’s it. A notes app, a spreadsheet, or a paper notebook all work. What matters is that it’s one place, and that the entries are short enough that you’ll actually write them. After a year, you’ll have a personal library of parts and speeches that no one else has, chosen by you.

When you’re cast in one of those plays, the log becomes the start of real work. That’s the point to read it twice more, with your character in mind, using the full process in our guide to breaking down a script.

Read for what other characters say about the role

The fastest way to size up a part is to notice how others talk about it. The character’s own lines show you how they see themselves. What everyone else says shows you how the world sees them, which is often the more useful thing to know before you go in for it. You’ll pick this up on your first read without stopping; jot it in your log afterward. Mason makes it a separate second read once you’re working on a role: note everything said about your character by others.

Here’s Ophelia, alone on stage, after Hamlet has turned on her in the third act of Hamlet:

OPHELIA: O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down!

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1 (public domain)

Read that as the actor who might play Hamlet, and you’ve learned something his own lines can’t tell you: before the play started, he was the young man everyone watched and admired, and Ophelia believes she’s watching him fall. Read it as the actor who might play Ophelia, and you’ve found a speech, a turn in her story, and a clue to how much she loved him.

That’s why the roles line in your log includes one thing other people say about each part. It takes thirty seconds and tells you far more about whether the part is for you than a character list ever will.

Build your list of roles

Over time, the log turns into a list of roles. It helps to sort them into three groups: parts you could be cast in now, parts you’re growing toward, and dream parts you’d take on in a class or a reading because they stretch you. Be honest about the first group. That’s the list you’ll use for auditions.

Size matters when you’re choosing. A great part in a short scene and a lead who barely leaves the stage are different jobs. Our play library shows every role in the classic plays it covers by line count and word count, with the scenes each role speaks in and its longest speeches, so you can see how big a part is before you commit to learning it.

Mark speeches as you go. When you find one that could work as a monologue, note where it starts and stops and roughly how long it runs. When you need audition material, you’ll already have a short list to choose from. Our monologue collection is a good place to look when your list runs thin, and our guide to cutting a monologue helps when a speech is too long.

Read widely, not just for type

It’s tempting to only read plays with a part for you in them. Don’t. Read the classics your teachers reference, new plays from the companies near you, comedies when you think of yourself as a dramatic actor, and plays from before 1900 even if you mostly work on camera. You learn as much about scene writing from a part you’ll never play as from one you will.

Where to read plays for free

Plays are expensive to buy one at a time, and you don’t need to. These are legal and free:

• Project Gutenberg’s Plays/Films/Dramas shelf collects public-domain plays, including Shakespeare, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, free to read online or download.
• Standard Ebooks’ drama list has free public-domain plays, from Aristophanes to Shaw, as carefully produced ebooks.
• The Folger Shakespeare lets you read and search all of Shakespeare’s works for free.
• For newer plays, New York Theatre Guide’s 2022 roundup of free places to read plays listed Playscripts’ Free Reads Corner, with 20 plays from its catalog free to read once you make a free account.
• Your public library. Many libraries carry play collections, and many can request titles they don’t have through interlibrary loan.

Public-domain texts, such as those on Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, are usually the easiest to copy, cut, and share for class. A modern edition or translation may still have its own rights, and if the play is still in copyright, read it freely, but check with your teacher or the theater before you photocopy a scene for a group.

Set a pace you can keep

There’s no official number of plays an actor should read. One play a week is a good pace to aim for, and it’s very doable: most plays take an evening, and fifty a year is a serious library. If that’s too much, pick one every two weeks and keep it. A slower habit you keep is worth more than an ambitious one you drop.

Make it easy to start. Keep the next play already chosen, downloaded, or on your nightstand, so you never have to decide what to read when you sit down. Alternate something you want to read with something you think you should. And read with friends sometimes: an informal reading where each person takes a few parts is one of the best ways to hear a play, and it doubles as cold-reading practice.

Hear the scenes you flagged out loud

When a scene on your list keeps calling to you, the next step is to hear it the way an audience would. That’s hard with only one voice. With Offbook, you can upload the pages as a PDF, photo, or text file, and Offbook splits them into roles and lines. Listen mode plays the whole scene out loud with realistic voices, so you can hear how it moves.

When you’re ready to try the role, pick your part. Offbook reads every other character and listens through your microphone, then plays the next cue when you finish your line. A full-length play fits too: the page picker can split a long script into scenes.

If you’d like to start with something already set up, our free run lines online tool has classic scenes read in Offbook’s voices that wait for your line, with no account needed. It’s a quick way to find out whether a part you flagged on the page also feels good in your mouth.

Questions actors ask

How many plays should an actor read?

There’s no set number. One play a week is a good pace to aim for, and it adds up to about fifty a year. What matters more is keeping a short log of each one so the reading turns into roles, scenes, and speeches you can actually use.

How do you read a play as an actor?

Read it in one sitting, mostly for pleasure, with some speeches out loud. Then write five quick lines: the title and year, what it’s about, the parts you could play, one possible monologue, and one scene to work on. When you’re cast, read it twice more with your character in mind.

Where can I read plays for free?

Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks have free public-domain plays, and the Folger Shakespeare has all of Shakespeare’s works free online. Playscripts has offered a small set of newer plays free with an account (as of 2022), and your public library may be able to borrow plays it doesn’t carry.

Should I read plays aloud?

Some of them, yes. You don’t need to perform the whole thing, but speaking the speeches you flagged tells you how they breathe and where they’re hard. Reading a play with friends, each taking a few parts, is even better.