(Forgot to do one of these items last week, so consider this a twofer.)

I love scripts. At my acting debut, at the age of 3 in a production of The Miracle Worker at the Ledges Playhouse in Grand Ledge, Michigan, I had no lines yet I demanded a script. My father mollified me by scrawling on a single piece of paper “Christopher runs onstage. Christopher stands onstage. Christopher runs offstage.”

Forty-seven years later I am still an avid consumer of scripts. I

On a trip to England in the late 1990s, I attended five separate Royal Shakespeare Company productions in a single week. A couple of these were new works, and I was  impressed, pleased beyond measure, when my press packet included a paperback copy of the play I was about to see. These weren’t photocopies but edited, published editions.

In the U.S., it took years of browbeating theaters until they realized I was serious about wanting copies of new works. Burned by too many insufficient summaries and misleading interviews, I began to insist that I wouldn’t write preview articles of new plays unless I had access to the scripts.

I’ve heard all the caveats and hesitations, and understand them—up to a point. Scripts only give you one dimension of what a full production will reveal. A reader’s imagination can lead to unfair expectations when the reader becomes a viewer of someone else’s interpretation. Scripts are subject to immense changes. They can be guides and should not be taken as the ultimate documentation of the theater process.

Yes, but they help much more than they hinder—for critics and arts writers as much as for actors and directors. Basically, I d0n’t like being ignorant, and it just makes good journalistic sense to make sure you have access to a text version of what you’re writing about, in the same way that political reporters have access to texts of speeches.

One of the best reasons to collect scripts as I do is that a lot of new plays are scuttled by hands other than the author’s. Or they are too expensive to produce as written. Or they have fleeting flaws which make them unproduceable yet otherwise enjoyable to read.

When the Yale Drama Series was created a few years ago (with monies from the David Charles Horn Foundation), its greatness was not just that the prize would be judged by some of the world’s greatest living playwrights. Nor was the prize of a reading in a Yale theater performed by professional actors the main excitement. To me, the wonder of the award is that the Yale School of Drama conspired with the Yale University Press to get the winning plays published.

I have two of these published scripts on my desk as I write this: The 2008 winner, Grenadine by Neil Wechsler; and the 2009 one, Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. Somehow I still haven’t picked up the published version of the inaugural winner in the series, John Austin Connelly’s The Boys of Siam (though I saw the reading). The 2010 winner, which had its reading a few months ago, is still months away from the release of its print edition. I’d prefer the immediacy with which new scripts are published in England, but you can’t have everything.

Both Grenadine and Lidless have introductions by the judges who picked them out of hundreds of submissions. Both judges—no less than Edward Albee (who did the honors for the prize’s first two years) and David Hare (who’s did the next two) take time to explain the selection process, which for both of them involved appointed surrogate readers to sift through the mountain of submission and winnow it down to a few dozen. Both Albee and Hare sought to use the Drama Series to further the art of playwriting rather than merely validate traditional forms. Both chose works notable for their contemporary resonance, topicality and unorthodox characters.

The judge for the 2011 edition (for which the submission deadline was back in August) will be John Guare, so we can assume similarly high and self-conscious standards.

I’m not going to review the plays here. I saw the live Yale reading of Lidless, which concerns Guatanamo Bay tortures, PTSD and family strife, and will withhold judgement until I’ve seen a full production. (The play’s had several since it won the Drama Series crown—at the University of Texas at Austin, at the HighTide Festival in Suffolk, England, and at the Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.) I missed the reading of Grenadine, a great regret since it involves four main characters with the other 26 being played by two performers.

My admiration here is not (yet) for the plays, which will hopefully grow in stature. It’s for the exercise of choosing, reading aloud and especially publishing the plays for a general audience. It’s for the opportunity to keep these beautiful volumes with their colorful covers on my bookshelves while so many cool yet unwieldy photocopied scripts I’ve been given have to settle for an unsorted stack in the basement. It’s for the ruminations of Albee and Hare on what makes a good new play. It’s for the valuable cross-fertilization of Yale School of Drama and Yale Press in discovering new writers and proclaiming what might be breakthrough works. It’s for fond memories of theatergoing in Europe, where they’ve long been better at this (though wait and see what happens when the austerity cuts kick in). And it’s for two fields considered on their deathbeds—playwrighting and print publishing—banding together and doubling their strength and influence.