It’s Easy, Free, and Laid-Back Fun
First things first. If it weren’t fun, I wouldn’t do it myself,
much less dedicate my life to preaching the Cold Reads gospel.
It takes no preparation, makes no mess, and it’s FREE.
What more could one ask?
A cold read is a game, like playing cards or Trivial Pursuit, charades,
(a jigsaw puzzle, treasure hunt, gallery crawl, softball, golf . . .)
We tell ourselves a story we don’t know and, as we read,
unravel it together, line by line,
taking time along the way to talk about whatever comes to mind.
What a great, relaxing way to socialize!
No Time at All
Read a 10-minute play over coffee or Hamlet in three hours.
Novels take all day and more.
All You Need Is a Digital Reader
Download plays for free.
It also exercises social and communication skills
(comprehensive reading, speaking, listening),
builds self-confidence.
Plays don’t have to be performed to
entertain, amuse, enlighten,
and enrich our lives
Theatre, live on stage—while to my mind
more potent and humane than theism—
in actuality is no more than a playwright’s script
played out by actors in costume under a paper moon.
It’s Spectacle,
the last and least of Aristotle’s
Six Elements of Drama
Plot, Character, Meaning, Language, and Mood
are all in the writing.
Plays are Literary Art
All creative writing is
one of the Big Three: Poetry, Prose, and Drama.
If we don’t see plays, we’re dramatically illiterate.
Unless we read them.
Plays are Novels with No Narrator
Just as rich in plot and character, sad and funny,
entertaining, moving, stimulating, meaningful—
only plays consist exclusively of people talking to each other.
We read novels to ourselves, by and for ourselves, alone.
Plays are tailor-made for quality time with friends.
Plays Represent Our Cultural History
For the first 2000 years of Western Civilization—
from the Ancient Greeks to the Industrial Revolution—
most people learned about the world from plays and players.
(They couldn’t read.)
And, more profoundly,
Reading plays makes human beings more humane.
(Even if you’re only reading, you’re still
being someone else—walking in another person’s shoes.)
These are but a few of the reasons plays are just as good as
(and in some ways far, far better than)
not only poetry and prose, but anything else we do in our free time
from Sunday School to golf.
Cold Reads/International 