Meanings
- uncountableThe quality of being suitable or effective for theatrical performance; the attribute of a play, script, or production that makes it apt for presentation on stage.
As I use it, the idea of stageworthiness includes pieces that an audience in a particular context expects, accepts, tolerates, and/or enjoys—everything except for pieces they reject, find boring, or those that disgust and/or anger them.
2018 May 31, Levi S. Gibbs, Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China, University of Hawaii Press, page 1592 more examples
The thousands of persons that relied upon the press for their judgments of the stageworthiness of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, as also the majority of the censorious who were careful to get their impressions at first hand, by going to see it at ten dollars a head, constituted a peculiarly nondescript lot of humans, sundered one from another by individual experience and point of view; and they are not likely to create any standard, either moral or æsthetic.
1905 October – 1906 January, The International Quarterly, volume XII, New York: FOX, DUFFIELD & COMPANY, page 365The professional dramatist, whether independent or attached by contract to a particular company, sold his script and all subsquent rights to the companies, and to do so he needed to persuade these potential buyers of the stageworthiness of his work, not simply its dramatic merit.
1986 October, Wendy Griswold, Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theater, 1576-1980, University of Chicago Press, page 31
Origin
Cite this entry
stageworthiness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/stageworthiness
“stageworthiness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/stageworthiness. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “stageworthiness,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/stageworthiness.
Source: stageworthiness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.