"A play is a passion"
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A play is a passion: four words that refuse to let theater hide behind respectability. Jerome Lawrence isn’t describing a hobby or a product; he’s insisting on temperature. In his hands, “play” isn’t the polite noun you buy a ticket to see, it’s a living force that comes from compulsion - from appetite, obsession, risk. The line works because it collapses the supposed distance between art and life. Passion is messy, bodily, sometimes embarrassing. Calling a play “a passion” drags the stage out of the realm of tasteful entertainment and back into the realm of need.
Lawrence’s career context sharpens the point. He co-wrote Inherit the Wind, a drama built around the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where the argument isn’t just evolution versus religion; it’s the right to think freely versus the comfort of enforced certainty. That kind of theater doesn’t function as neutral diversion. It has stakes. Passion, here, is also moral energy: the fuel that makes an audience feel implicated, not merely amused.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to cynicism and to the idea that theater should be safe. A “play” suggests craft - structure, dialogue, blocking. “Passion” suggests motive - why anyone would endure rejection, rewrites, thin budgets, and the nightly gamble of live performance. Lawrence is staking out theater as an act of insistence: if it’s not driven by something urgent, it’s just words under lights.
Lawrence’s career context sharpens the point. He co-wrote Inherit the Wind, a drama built around the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where the argument isn’t just evolution versus religion; it’s the right to think freely versus the comfort of enforced certainty. That kind of theater doesn’t function as neutral diversion. It has stakes. Passion, here, is also moral energy: the fuel that makes an audience feel implicated, not merely amused.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to cynicism and to the idea that theater should be safe. A “play” suggests craft - structure, dialogue, blocking. “Passion” suggests motive - why anyone would endure rejection, rewrites, thin budgets, and the nightly gamble of live performance. Lawrence is staking out theater as an act of insistence: if it’s not driven by something urgent, it’s just words under lights.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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