Directors of plays can make rehearsals interpretively productive, but they must first reject directorial approaches such as beginning rehearsals without analyzing the script, projecting images of the play as it is read, and using the script merely to summarize meanings, static themes, morals, and nothing more. Making rehearsals interpretively productive requires prerehearsal interpretations that ask "why" over and over again until every perceivable moment of the script has been fully rationalized and reconciled with every other moment into a coherent "action to be communicated," not merely an action to be executed before an audience. The most useful way for the director to formulate this action is in terms of final cause: that is, as a web of understandings of the communicative job to be done, of the impact performance that they should have on the audience moment by moment. During rehearsal, this sketchy cognitive structure of how the play should be communicated should be tested, revised, and fleshed out. In rehearsal, the final test of a script is "apprehensive rightness"--an intuitive realization that the show does, indeed, make sense, is fully coherent, and will affect the audience in a powerful and meaningful way. (RL)