Art & Creativity Quote by Anatole Broyard

Live theater makes failure feel like a social contract broken in real time. Broyard’s line lands because it doesn’t argue that plays are uniquely fragile as literature; it argues they’re uniquely accusatory as encounters. A bad novel can be abandoned, a bad painting can be walked past, a bad film can be half-watched with the anesthetic of screens and editing. Onstage, though, “real people” stand a few yards away, expending breath and dignity on material that can’t support them. The audience isn’t just consuming; it’s participating in a small civic ritual. When that ritual collapses, the embarrassment is shared.

The key word is “offensive,” not “boring.” Broyard implies that bad theater violates intimacy. The proximity turns artistic incompetence into something like bad manners: you’re trapped while someone insists you feel something you don’t. The actors’ bodies intensify the coercion. Their effort demands a response, and when the writing or staging is thin, that demand starts to feel manipulative, even indecent, as if the play is using human presence to launder its emptiness.

As a late-20th-century critic, Broyard is also defending the seriousness of taste without sounding puritanical. He’s admitting that spectatorship has ethics: your time, attention, and empathy are being solicited by actual people, not mere “content.” Theater’s strength is immediacy; the subtext is that immediacy is also a liability. When it fails, it fails in your lap.