Daily Inspiration Quote by Elia Kazan

Kazan’s compliment lands like a backhand: he grants Broadway actors one virtue, and he chooses the least “artistic” one. Not craft, not imagination, not courage - competition. The “so-called” does a lot of dirty work here, downgrading the very identity of “Broadway actor” into a brand someone might slap on a resume. It’s a director’s power move, but also a diagnostic: in Kazan’s view, the Broadway ecosystem trains performers to treat every rehearsal room as an arena, every scene as a bid for dominance.

The intent is partly corrective and partly contemptuous. Kazan came up through the Group Theatre and then shaped mid-century American realism on stage and screen, where vulnerability and psychological truth were the gold standard. Broadway, especially in its commercial mode, can reward polish, volume, and survivability - traits that play well to the back row and to producers with investors to soothe. “Competitive sense” becomes shorthand for that survival IQ: hitting marks, winning attention, protecting status, sensing where the spotlight is headed and arriving first.

Subtext: Kazan is saying the culture of Broadway can deform acting into a zero-sum sport. He respects the hustle because it’s real, because it works, because it wins nights and careers. He also implies it’s insufficient - that the habit of competing can crowd out the harder work of communion, of listening, of risk. Coming from a famously ruthless, polarizing figure, the line doubles as self-portrait: admiration for the will to win, paired with skepticism about what gets sacrificed when winning becomes the method and the meaning.