answer:There’s such a thing as a “closet drama” that is meant to be read and not performed. But most plays are meant to be performed. A good play can be understood and appreciated as literature but has its fullest realization in performance. Even a read-aloud with a group of friends can give it a life that it doesn’t have inside the reader’s mind. You might compare it with a piano arrangement of an orchestral score or a black-and-white photo of an oil painting. You can get some notion of what it’s about, but without the scale and color and texture of the artist’s original composition, you can’t experience and appreciate the creator’s actual work. A stage play, however, is a work of words and can be studied as words, as compared with a screenplay, which is mostly about action.