I once gave an actor a play I'd written, set in the fairly remote past. "I like it," he said, "but when are you going to write a new play?" When I told him this one was brand-new, he said, "I mean a play about our own time." He was, of course, an American actor. It's an American disease to have no past, or a generic Everypast of equal irrelevance to everything new. Since we come out of the past and live surrounded by its results, and since every current issue is only an old issue being fought on new terrain, you'd think we would catch on, but we don't. When a play from the past is produced, the sense of a missed connection is sometimes more palpable than the reasons for bringing it back. The fault may be in the play, or in the artists interpreting it, and there are those classically maddening occasions when the audience, always eager to mistake dressing for substance, flatly refuses to accept the old forms and old language as expressing what may be the most pungently up-to-date... More >>>