Daily Inspiration Quote by Brooks Atkinson

A good play, Atkinson implies, is not a pleasant evening out; it is an instrument with an edge. The line flips the usual hierarchy of cultural life: the audience isn’t automatically the judge, the artist isn’t automatically on trial. Instead, the work becomes the examiner, and certain spectators fail the test.

Atkinson knew this species well. As a dominant American theater critic in mid-century New York, he watched Broadway harden into both a civic ritual and a consumer product. “Bad playgoers” aren’t people with imperfect taste so much as people who arrive with the wrong contract in mind: they want validation, comfort, status, the reassurance of recognizable morals and tidy endings. They treat theater as lifestyle décor. A genuinely good play violates that contract. It demands attention, tolerates ambiguity, and refuses to flatter the room. That refusal reads, to the wrong kind of audience member, like an insult.

The barb is also aimed at an ecosystem that mistakes box-office happiness for artistic health. If the goal is to keep everyone serene, the theater becomes customer service; the play becomes a compliant commodity. Atkinson’s sentence defends the productive irritation of art: the awkward silence after a scene that lands too close to home, the discomfort of seeing cherished myths dismantled, the anger of being denied an easy takeaway.

There’s a sly, democratic confidence in it, too. Theater matters enough to provoke. If a play can drive someone crazy, it’s because it’s doing what live performance does best: turning a room full of strangers into a public conscience, whether they asked for it or not.