I was gonna say I don't know anything about reading plays. Very perceptive of you. Here you go. Ninety-six pages chock full of pure wisdom. A Technical Manual for Reading Plays is based on methods he developed while working as Literary Director at the Guthrie Theater.
Ball looks at the craft playwrights use to make their plays stageworthy.
He shows you how to discover what the playwright considers the play's most important elements, thus letting you evaluate the play based on its foundation rather than its details. Hell no . It takes years to learn how to interpret blueprints. I'm not as good as some builders are, but I can get a pretty accurate picture of the building by studying the prints. Think of a play as a set of blueprints.