"Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them"

Thornton Wilder evokes the theater as a living contract between text and performance. A play, for him, is not a sealed artifact but a promissory note, value deferred until actors and directors authorize it with their signatures. The metaphor of a blank check stresses both openness and risk: the playwright entrusts others with vast discretionary power, knowing that the sum “cashed” will vary by company, culture, and moment. Far from abdication, that trust is the engine of theatrical vitality.

He fashioned scripts that welcome such signatures. Our Town’s bare stage, ladders, and the mediating Stage Manager invite artists to inscribe choices about community, memory, and mortality. The Skin of Our Teeth stretches time and genre, daring a troupe to chart tone and scale. Minimal scenery and metatheatrical cues are not omissions but spaces, white margins, where interpretation breathes.

Calling performances signatures implies identity and accountability. An actor stamps the role with a personal history of breath, cadence, gesture; a director curates rhythm, image, and silence. Each new signature both honors and transforms the check’s issuer. The text provides legal tender, structure, language, event, yet the negotiated value only appears in rehearsal and before an audience whose imagination becomes a co-signer.

Such a view undercuts rigid fidelity to authorial intent. Fidelity becomes a deeper faithfulness to dramatic potential rather than to surface prescription. Theater’s liveness demands contemporaneity; a blank check can be responsibly spent to meet the needs of a new time without defaulting on the play’s core obligations.

Finally, the metaphor articulates humility and confidence. Humility: the writer accepts incomplete control. Confidence: the writer trusts that collaborators, by risking their own signatures, will pay out meanings he could not foresee. The result is a renewable art form, where the same lines can authorize different expenditures of feeling and thought, each performance a transaction with reality.