Why do we go to the theater? Supposedly, it enriches our life, in any of half a dozen ways. We get thrills, we get meaning, we get laughs, we get music and dance, we get glamour and excitement; we get issues framed to raise our hackles and questions raised to make us search our hearts. We come in contact with people—the real ones performing or the fictional ones they play—who are not part of our everyday experience. We get to identify ourselves with them, or shrink in repulsion from their awfulness, or weigh our lives and actions against theirs. We go back to the everyday world, hopefully, with an enhanced sense of what life is, and what living it means to us, a heightened awareness that puts whatever else we do in the bumbling course of our days... More >>>