When it comes down to it, though, the thing that makes a live performance work for me is the sense of magic it contains. Performance always involves smoke and mirrors, to some extent, and that’s what makes it amazing and so powerful when it works. When you walk into the theater you know you’re going to be deceived. You’ve paid for the privilege of it. There’s nothing worse than a show where nothing is left to the imagination, where every detail is painstakingly rendered, where my role as an audience member is entirely passive—there are plenty of other mediums I could turn to for that.
-Alexis Clements, playwright

The kids had some friends over in the morning, we were playing with the train that runs around our Christmas tree and making some iPhone videos. The new puppy had some other ideas…

 
I think I’ve been watching Hell’s Kitchen too much. I’m sitting at a bar right now watching them cook, and I almost shouted “You donkey! Is that your best?! NOT GOOD ENOUGH!”

The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal to basic and commonplace emotions–love of woman, love of home, love of country, love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery.
-CLAYTON HAMILTON, Theory of the Theatre

The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel’s.
-TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Afterword to Camino Real