Talk:Theatre/Draft material

Draft material for future inclusion in the theatre article.

When an actor takes his place on a stage, even in the most apparently trivial vehicle, and his audience begins to respond to his performance, together they concentrate the complex values of a culture with an intensity that less immediate transactions cannot rival. They embody its shared language of spoken words and expressive gestures, its social expectations and psychological commonplaces, its conventions of truth and beauty, its nuances of prejudice and fear, its erotic fascinations, and frequently its sense of humor. Whenever this isn't so, the actor will fail. The theater exists at the center of civilized life, not at its peripheries.

This might be a little too acting-centred: "If each age prides itself on having attained the right answers about how the world works, it prides itself equally on being able to view theatrical exhibitions of human feeling that are more realistic and natural than those of the previous age."