Life & Wisdom Quote by George P. Baker

Baker draws a sharp evolutionary ladder of theater that quietly doubles as a value system. At the bottom is something almost animal: the instinct to impersonate. That word instinct matters; it frames acting less as refined technique than as a human itch, the primordial pleasure of trying on another self. Then comes a social turn: the playwright isn’t just someone who imitates, but someone who wants to give that pleasure to others. Theater, in this framing, is born not from solitary expression but from a transactional hunger for audience delight.

The final step is where Baker reveals his real stake. Dramatic literature emerges only when the playwright’s aim shifts from merely entertaining impersonation to doing it “adequately,” with characterization and dialogue that can stand on their own. He’s policing the boundary between theater as ephemeral performance and theater as an art that survives the night. “Memorable in itself” is the tell: Baker is arguing for writing that doesn’t lean on actors to supply the electricity, but carries intrinsic charge on the page.

The subtext is early-20th-century institutional confidence. As a major American teacher of drama, Baker helped legitimize playwriting as a discipline worthy of university study and literary status. His progression flatters craft, revision, and textual rigor; it also gently demotes the actor’s centrality by making acting the raw material and literature the finished product. The line reads like pedagogy disguised as taxonomy: not just how theater happens, but what Baker wants theater to become.