The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.

I go to the theatre expecting to have a good time. I want each play and performance to take me somewhere. Naturally, this doesn't always happen.

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.

Tony Awards boost Broadway attendance and sell the shows on the road. They're the sugar to swat the fly. If you needed more explanation for the yearly ballyhoo, in the metropolitan areas where a Broadway show plays, the local economy is boosted by three and a half times the gross ticket sales. So when we're talking Tonys, we're talking moolah.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.