… asks David Jays in today’s Guardian. I’m rather with “zauberberg” in the comments section when she or he says, “I find the very fact that this question is posed baffling.”

But more, they’d pretty damn well be literature or the May 2010 issue of Theater journal from the Yale School of Drama is a waste of so much pulp and ink. This new issue specifically addresses the current status of play-as-text or vice versa, featuring new performance texts from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Romeo and Juliet) and Big Art Group (SOS), as well as essays by editor Tom Sellar, Juliana Francis Kelly, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Karinne Keithley. I suppose I provide my own response to Jays’ question in my own contribution to the issue, “The Booking of the Play” — about six thousand words of it, I think, and only available to paying customers there, or on your local newsstands now.

But in brief: are plays literature? Of course they are, and capable of being interpreted from a variety of valid standpoints as readers: for entertainment, for study, for formal qualities. It’s just that, like novels, poems and other forms, sometimes they’re very bad literature indeed.