Why Don't I Read More Plays?

An intriguing item in today's (10/20/11) San Francisco Chronicle tells of one of Eugene O'Neill's seemingly lost plays, "Exorcism," turning up in a researcher's archives. It had apparently been given to the writer Philip Yordan as a Christmas gift by Agnes Boulton, O'Neill's second wife. Besides being interested in this news, and, as always, being happy when a lost book or any work of art is re-found, I started musing about why I almost never read plays any more. When I was in college and grad school, and even for a little while afterward, I read plenty of plays by many playwrights, from Euripides and Shakespeare to Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, Miller, Albee, Pinter, Beckett, Williams, Hellman, Mamet, Hansberry, and many more. (Note that only two of these are female, and that to this day there are far too few women playwrights.) I do go to the theater occasionally (well, to be honest, these days very occasionally), but I never wake up and think "I should read a play today!" or "Why don't I re-read O'Neill, or Williams, or Albee?" in the way that I often DO think, "I want to re-read Eliot, Dickens, Cather, Wharton, Woolf (and many more)." (In fact, I actually and frequently DO re-read these authors.) In a time period in which I have read hundreds of books -- novels, short story collections, memoirs, essay collections, professional books, etc. --, why haven't I read more than a very small handful of plays? Is it because a play on the page seems like a poor substitute for a performance? Does the play seem rather inert on the page? Is it the chopped-up visual look of the play in print? I am not sure. I am curious: Do any of you read plays? Why or why not?