Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Anderson

Anderson’s line reads like a dare disguised as advice: stop trying to manufacture importance and instead put your own pulse on the page. The mission isn’t to “represent society” or chase a tidy moral. It’s to look inward, write what’s urgent now, and do it with enough heat that the audience can feel the writer’s stakes. That’s a bracing, almost anti-literary stance in an era when theater often gets judged by its themes before it’s judged by its truth.

The subtext is tougher than it first sounds. “Whatever concerns him at the moment” rejects the fantasy of neutrality; it implies the playwright’s anxieties, blind spots, and obsessions will leak into the work whether he admits it or not. Better to choose that leak intentionally. Passion and conviction aren’t decorative virtues here; they’re the engine that makes a play readable as lived experience rather than thesis.

Then comes the hard clause: “the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.” That’s accountability, and it lands differently with a soldier attached to the author line. Soldiers are trained to act under pressure, to accept that character isn’t private but proven by decisions. Anderson imports that ethic into art: your craft can’t outgrow your courage. The implication is slightly unforgiving, even moralistic: smallness in the writer produces smallness onstage; integrity scales the work.

Contextually, it’s a mid-century American belief in authenticity over cleverness, but also a warning. If you’re hiding from your own questions, the audience will know.