Life & Wisdom Quote by Hal Price

The engine here is a double-edged hunger: the desire to be satisfied as an audience member, and the refusal to stay powerless when the culture doesn’t deliver. Hal Price frames theatregoing less as passive consumption than as a diagnostic test. He knows the feeling of scanning a season and realizing the work you crave doesn’t exist in the room, not because it’s impossible, but because institutions don’t program it, investors don’t bet on it, or tradition quietly polices what “counts” as a certain kind of show.

The sly brilliance is in “one of two things and sometimes they dovetail.” It’s a modest phrase that smuggles in ambition. He’s not claiming to reinvent theatre; he’s describing a feedback loop between taste and craft. The subtext: artists aren’t born from pure self-expression so much as from absence. Scarcity becomes a creative brief.

Price also positions authorship as an act of cultural infrastructure. “So it would be there” isn’t about personal catharsis; it’s about adding a rung to the ladder for others. That line implies a community of future spectators and makers who deserve options beyond what’s currently on offer. It’s a quietly political stance, because it treats representation, genre, and form as matters of access: if the theatre won’t host the show you’re looking for, the answer isn’t only complaint. It’s construction.

There’s no martyrdom in the tone, just a pragmatic credo: wanting something is permission to make it, and making it is a way of insisting your taste has a rightful place in public.