Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerome Lawrence

Broadway, in Jerome Lawrence's telling, doesn’t lose to rival shows; it loses to the audience’s threshold for tedium. That framing is less a clever quip than a market reality dressed up as artistic doctrine. By naming boredom as the real enemy, Lawrence quietly shifts responsibility onto the makers: the theater’s “competition” isn’t another playwright’s brilliance, it’s the minute-by-minute experience in the seat. If the play fails, the audience doesn’t merely dislike it; they defect.

The line’s sharpest move is its pairing of emotion with economics. “Revolted” is visceral, almost moral; “Broadway prices” is bluntly transactional. Lawrence understands that live theater sells more than narrative: it sells a night out, time, childcare, transit, prestige. When the ticket is expensive, dissatisfaction hardens into a kind of consumer justice. Walking out becomes a verdict, and “not come back” is the real punishment: lost future revenue, lost word-of-mouth, lost trust in the whole ecosystem.

Context matters. Lawrence wrote in a 20th-century Broadway where commercial stakes were high and the audience had growing alternatives: movies, television, later the whole apparatus of at-home entertainment. His point anticipates today’s attention economy without sounding like a tech think-piece. Theater can’t compete on convenience, so it must compete on urgency. Keep them awake, keep them feeling, keep them convinced their money wasn’t spent on a chair.