Gross, Roger Understanding Playscripts --
Theory and Method   Bowling Green University Press, Ohio, 1974.

p. 4. DRAMA, PLAY, AND PLAYSCRIPT :
"Drama" is the name of an idea.
   The term calls attention to certain occurrences which are related in some respects.
   Drama has no "body" ; it exists only as an idea of relationship.

"A Play" is the name of a kind of occurrence. it does not exist ; it happens.
   A play has no "body" ; it is the behavior of bodies.

"A Playscript" is the name of a kind of thing, a symbolic notation on which certain kinds of play are based. It is no more identical with the play than s set of written instructions for making a painting is a painting.
 

An idea, an occurence, a thing. This is no quibble. Each has its own set of rules, its own uses and dangers. To miss the distinctions is to risk confusion. Some of the greatest errors in dramatic theory, for example, have grown from the mistake of treating Drama as though it were a thing which could be examined and described factually. Playscripts may be examined, Plays may be observed, but not Drama. "Drama" may mean whatever we want it to mean, but we cannot prove it to be anything.

p.5 Drama is the name of an artistic genre, the particular instances of which are called Plays or Dramas.
A Play is a specific instance of the performance of a story for an audience which is aware that it is seeing a play. The story is partially, often wholly, embodied, not told, and requires impersonation by actors.

A playscript is a written statement of words to be spoken by actors ; it may also include instructions for use of other theatrical workers. Playwrights occasionally set down explicit statements of the "meaning" of the playscript but such statements ae generally not considered part of the playscript proper ; they have a different sort of evidential value when the reader comes to make his crucial decisions. A playscript is not "the play in another medium," nor does it "represent" the play ; it implies a play.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE PLAYSCRIPT TO THE PLAY

p.11 No script is, in itself, a complete play. We can't just "do" the script on stage. The process of production might be called a "transformation" of the script.

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION :
  Taking It Apart Into Pieces(Analysis) and
  Putting Them All Back(Synthesis) to a Whole With Interpretation

THE FALLACY OF NEUTRAL PERFORMANCE
  When an actor speaks, he does interpret. No matter what study has preceded his speech, no matter what degree of conscious choice or how strong the intention to be neutral, the audience sees and hears an interpretation.

Sense is not released or discovered ; it is constructed in the mind of an interpreter and exists nowhere else.

THE FALLACY OF MEANING ON THE FACE
  John Wain says ;

     . . . life cannot be separated into its individual grains, even for the purpose of examination. For if we do, what we are examining is not life.

     All these are variations on the basic error of assuming that meaning is something that is in the words and can simply be seen.
     All that can be seen when one looks at printed words is a mass of marks. When those marks mean something, the reader has, consciously or not, related this visual stimulus to patterns of past experience and, by a complicated process of elimination, reached the conclusion, that, the marks being what it is, the situation being as it is, according to his knowledge of the way people use words, the man who made that mark may reasonably be inferred to have meant such and such. He never sees meaning ; rather he makes sense.

Meaning : Meaningful Response of Audience/Reader to Symbols/Patterns with Sign Potential

THE DIFFICULTY OF THE CONCEPT OF "MEANING"

meaning is not an entity. It has no local habitation. It occurs. Nothing actually has meaning. Any thing or occurrence, however, may become a sign, i.e., it may provoke in someone that patterned response called meaning, People experience meaning; things and occurrences "have" sign-potential. To describe a "meaning of the script" is not to find meaning in it but to respond to it meaningfully and to formulate that response.

Meaning is patterned mental response to external events/things.

Meaning is patterned mental response to external events/things