“I understood now why I loved to go to the theatre, even when I did not respect it in the way I respected the very idea of a concert. When I had been contemptuous of the stage I had generally been displeased by the emptiness of the plays. But I loved to go to the theatre because the presence of the actors–their aliveness, the closeness of the audience, and the anticipation of a communion between all of them in terms of imagination, embodied through their actual movement in tangible space–was the very flower of large social contact, even when the occasion for this contact, in terms of literature, was a silly anecdote. At each performance in the theatre something happened between contemporaries that was a deep pleasure for those who loved the human vibration of people in their common play and enthusiasm.”
Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
