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Text Analysis 4 
It is a fact of experience that nothing invigorates the imagination more than a spell of sharp thinking. 
Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination 
Playscript interpretation is not the script itself or the mere passive reflection of it; it is a kind of action. This action is either intrinsic or extrinsic depending upon where it ends up. If one is left with a statement about the work itself, the critic has been intrinsic; if one is left with a statement about history, or the author's life, or the nature of man, or whatnot, the critic has been extrinsic. 
Richard Hornby, Script into Performance 
Once designers have gathered and organized script facts, they can begin to ask questions about meaning, interpretation, and style. Final answers to these questions will, of course, be up to the entire production group; theatrical collaboration is most successful, however, when everyone in the group participates fully in the process. Designers should begin to ask text analysis questions as an integral part of their preparation for the first production meeting. Raising analytical questions and exploring various answers involve a variety of interpretive strategies, some of which are lifted from traditional literary criticism and some from more recent and perhaps more radical literary theories. Others depend on the reader's ability to place the play in its historical context and to understand the various roles theatre has played throughout human history. But perhaps the most important context theatre designers bring to the process of making textual connections is that of current thought, current beliefs, and the contemporary Zeitgeist, an essentially untranslatable German word whose 

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overall meaning is considerably richer than its face value translation: spirit of the time. 
Text Defined 
For clarity in discussing dramatic text analysis, I am defining text in a rather narrow way as: "the sum total of the playwright's intentions and all the intellectual and aesthetic performance potential within the total written work." This definition includes, in part, 
1.	both the conscious and unconscious intentions of the playwright, including possible influences from the playwright's own life and personal experience 
2.	the relationship of the play to its own intellectual atmosphere and to subsequent and future streams of thought 
3.	the resonance of history on the play in its own time, as well as in subsequent arid future historical periods 
4.	the place of the play in the history of theatre, both as script and as performance (as well as the place of certain plays in the history and development of literature) 
	5.. 	the ways in which the play has been staged and designed, and all potential for staging and designing 
6.	the reactions of audiences to initial performances of the play, the reactions of subsequent audiences, and the potential for future audience reactions. 
It becomes obvious that a play's text extends well beyond the confines of the slender eighty-eight-page playscript I examined at the beginning of chapter 2. It is also obvious that a theatre designer who sets off in the direction of textual analysis is in for a good many side trips along the way. However, in the excitement of poking about in so many byways, it is also important to remember that text analysis must be as firmly grounded in the playwright's words as is the detective work of finding and categorizing clues within the playscript. 

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Design and Text Analysis 
All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing. A sign of this is our love of the senses; for even apart from their use, they are loved on their own account, and above all the rest, the one through the eyes. For not only in order that we might act, but even when we are not going to act at all, we prefer seeing, one might say, as against everything else. And the cause is that, among the senses, this one most of all makes us discover things, and makes evident many differences. (Aristotle, The Metaphysics, translated by Joe Sachs) 
Just how can exploring one or more of the approaches to text analysis help designers locate, house, costume, and illuminate plays? Is text analysis not merely an exercise in academic nit-picking that at best wastes time and at worst actually inhibits creativity? Can there really be any useful relationships between, for example, designing and building a wagon for Mother Courage's business venture in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children and 
1.	figuring out what the German word Verfremdung, usually translated into English as "alienation effect," is all about 
2.	digging into what Brecht and various literary drama critics have had to say about Epic Theatre 
3.	trying to make sense of Brecht as playwright, dramatic theorist, and 
sympathetic Communist, if not Party member 
4.	exploring the character of Mother Courage 
	S. 	learning about the Thirty Years' War 
6.	looking for connections between the Thirty Years' War and Europe in 1941, the year Mother Courage premiered in Zurich 
7.	asking throughout how contemporary concerns influence the ways in which an audience will respond to a performance of Mother Courage today 
Finally, even if text analysis can be shown to have a positive effect on the design process, how can a busy designer find the time to become an expert in 

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fields as diverse as dramatic theory and criticism, political science, and European history? 
First of all, it is a mistake to approach dramatic text analysis as an academic task, something that resembles a class assignment, or requires consulting a bibliography made up of the dullest sorts of books, or invites consideration of hair-splitting and insignificant details and must result in a formal paper or presentation introduced by some kind of thesis statement. 
True text analysis-like a real intellectual workout-is concentrated action. 
It is the endlessly exciting process of figuring out why a play is put together in its own unique way and of discovering at least a few of the meanings that lurk within it. Text analysis is an intensification of the conversation between the designer and the play that began in the search for facts and structure; only now the conversation includes more voices. Active text analysis illuminates the play and encourages imaging. Ideas, contexts, correlations, and opinions discovered through reading and exploring the broader contexts of the play's world become the basis for choosing the specific images through which an audience will come to know the play. 
Second, active text analysis always turns up more questions than answers and should never be pursued in. order to prove a point or to substantiate a restricted view of the play, particularly when the designer is still exploring many design possibilities. Recalling that ambiguity is a Significant component of plays, the designer must concentrate on discovering diverse, even opposing, points of view whenever he or she is exploring a dramatic text. 
Finally, in response to the charge that theatre designers have neither the time nor the expertise to tackle text analysis, I would remind you that you already have more analytical skills than you recognize, and that all creative work requires time and effort if it is to rise above the mundane. There are no simple formulas or quick-and-easy directions for any part of making theatre. Like all art, theatre design comes out of everything the designer is, knows, and experiences, the total content of your knowledge bucket. Every time you begin a project, the first step should be to assess .what you already know about the play, the playwright, and the period or periods involved. Then, as time permits, read something you have not read before, look at unfamiliar images, and make new connections; not only will this contribute to the specific project you are working on, it will also add new experiences to your knowledge bucket to use in future designs. 

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Mother Courage in Context

How might an excursion into text analysis help a designer to ask questions that begin to bring Mother Courage's wagon into focus in his or her imagination and, when the wagon appears in the production, imbue it with visual meaning for the audience? 
The following relatively random bits of information were collected by a designer who found them evocative. They come from a variety of sources and demonstrate the kinds of items that contribute to an expanded textual context which can inform the design images for a production of Mother Courage. 
1.	Verfremdung 
Neither the play nor the stage production would be required to maintain any consistent illusion of actuality. On the contrary, such illusion was to be destroyed by fragmentation of scenes and settings, by the interruption of action, and by a deliberate severing of suspense. (John Gassner, Form and Idea in Modern Theatre) 
2.	Epic Theatre (Brecht's description, 1926) 
To expound the principles of the epic theatre in a few catchphrases is not possible. They still mostly need to be worked out in detail, and include representation by the actor, stage technique, dramaturgy, stage music, use of the film, etc. The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things. At the same time it would be quite wrong to try and deny emotion to this kind of theatre. (quoted in John Willett's The Theatre of Benoit Brecht) 
3.	Brecht and Communism 
Outwardly, he was for nearly thirty years an orthodox Communist. But he was never a party member, or even a party journalist or speaker .... Today, when the Soviet Communist Party has become so widely criticized, not only on intellectual and aesthetic but above allan moral grounds, our judgment of the hard social core of Brecht's work largely depends on what we imagine to be its relation to the official doctrine and official line. (John Willett, The Theatre of Benoit Brecht) 

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Figure 4-1. Mother Courage and her wagon, from the production of Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, at The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C., with Pat Carroll and Floyd
King. Photograph by Joan Marcus. 
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Brecht was a very simple person. If you met him in the yard, he might be deep in conversation but he was never so wrapped up that he overlooked one of the workers. He said good morning to a cleaning woman from twenty yards away: the workers soon noted this. (Gerhard R., electrician, quoted in Brecht as They Knew Him, edited by Hubert Witt) 
4.	The Character of Mother Courage 
Mother Courage is a complex figure. Brecht correctly resisted anyone presenting her primarily as a mother who, "like Niobe," is unable "to protect her children from the vicissitudes of war." For the playwright, Mother Courage is the "merchant-mother," "a great living contradiction who is disfigured and deformed beyond recognition." In the scene on the battlefield she is "truly the hyena." ("Mother Courage and Her Children," by Franz Norbert Mennemeier, in Brecht A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Peter Demetz) 
6.	The Thirty Years' War 
The Thirty Years' War (1 61 8-48) was really four successive wars that began in Bohemia, spread to the rest of the Empire, and finally involved most of the major powers on the Continent. It was a savage and demoralizing conflict that left "Germany poorer and weaker than the western European states .... The war sprang out of a complicated mixture of religious and political grievances." (Joseph R. Strayer, Hans W Gatzke, and E. Harris Harbison, The Maintream of Civilization Since 1500) 
Then was there naught but beating and burning, plundering, torture, and murder. Most especially was everyone of the enemy bent on securing much booty. When a marauding party entered a house, if its master had anything to give he might thereby purchase respite and protection for himself and his family till the next man, who also wanted something, should come along. It was only when everything had been brought forth and there was nothing left to give that the real trouble commenced. (Otto von Guericke, 1631, in Readings in European History, edited by James Harvey Robinson) 
6.	Mother Courage Premiere, Zurich, April 19, 1941 
Consider what effect the war in progress might have had upon the playwright. Perhaps he read the follOwing report in a newspaper. 
Thirty-four people were killed in the cellar ballroom of the Cafe de Paris on March 8, 1941, when a bomb penetrated the ceiling and exploded on the 

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bandstand, wiping out the band and many of the dancers. Nicholas Monsarrat recalls the scene a few moments later: 
The first thing which the rescue squads and the firemen saw ... was a frieze of other shadowy men, night-creatures who had scuttled within as soon as the echoes ceased, crouching over any ... corpse they could find ... ripping off its necklace, or earrings, or brooch .... 
That vignette suggests the difficulty of piercing the barrier of romantic optimism about human nature implicit in the Allied victory and the resounding Allied extirpation of flagrant evil. ... One could say of the real war what Barbara Foley has said of the Holocaust-not that it's "unknowable," but "that its full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological frameworks that we have inherited from the liberal era." (Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War) 
7.	A Contemporary Production of Mother Courage 
Reflect upon audience awareness and response to the relationship between current events and the events in the play. 
"It is a war. It has started," said Raymond Chretien, who was asked by the United Nations to take a month from his post as Canada's ambassador to the United States, travel to Africa and make recommendations on how the world body should respond to recent conflict involving Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi .... Chretien ... said he fears a repeat of the tribal massacres in Rwanda two years ago. "We would all lose a piece of our soul to accept another genocide of that kind," he said. (Washington Post, Thursday, 
October 31, 1996) 
Conversations With a Text 
Imagine exploring the wider context of Mother Courage with the playscript in one hand and the various notes, books, visual images, journals, and newspapers, to which the journey has taken us, spread out nearby. The designer's challenge is to make connections between everything, script, script facts, and the various contexts in which the play can be considered. What follows are descriptions of two brief deSigner-play conversations, the kind that might take place in the text analysis process. These interior conversations 

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illustrate how designers use the process, in this case to discover images for Mother Courage's wagon and to consider how an audience might be led to discover something about the meaning of the play by seeing each of those images. Remember that even though these conversations occur inside the designer's head while he or she is thinking, reading, taking notes, drawing, or even engaging in tasks that have nothing whatsoever to do with designing, they begin because the designer sets them in motion. They are intentional, even though they may occur in bits and pieces and the designer cannot always control timing or content. 
Subject: looking for Connections Between Mother Courage and Her Wagon 
Mother Courage stays close to her wagon. It is home to her and to her children. It is her transportation from battlefield to battlefield as the war zigzags back and forth across Europe. With the wagon beside her, she can say, We are in business. The wagon even contributed to her name. 

SERGEANT: 
MOTHER COURAGE: 

Courage? What kind of name is that? 
I was once so scared of going bust I drove my cart right through the bombardment of Riga-right through the heart of it-with fifty loaves of bread in the back. That's why they call me Courage. Mind you, the bread was going mouldy, I didn't have much choice. 

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When she has a chance to save her second son Swiss Cheese's life by selling the wagon and using the money to bribe the men who have threatened to kill him, she cannot bring herself to do it. I've only had it seventeen years. I can't. Without money, I'm nothing. Any stranger can kick me in the ditch. When, in absolute desperation, she finally agrees to the price, knowing she cannot recoup her losses, she is too late to keep him from being shot. Maybe I haggled too long. Brecht calls her a "merchant-mother." He puts merchant first. Remember, although Mother Courage is poor and does not have a horse to pull her wagon, she is "in business." Remember also that she loses her first son, Eilif, to the war because she is too busy selling a belt buckle to prevent Eilif from joining up. Brecht connects business and war: 

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MOTHER COURAGE: 
and war and order: 
SERGEANT: 

To hear them all talk, you'd think these people at the top waged war for the fear of God and in the name of everything that's fine and noble. But just look into it, you'll find they're not that stupid. They're fighting for money. And just as well. Otherwise the little people like you and me wouldn't bother to join in. 
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? They haven't had a war here for such a long time. Without a good war, where do you get your moral standards from? Everything goes to pot in peacetime. 

Is Mother Courage proud of her wagon? Does she take excellent care of it? 
Or, does she take it for granted, much as she does her children? Consider all the things that must come out of it and go into it: belts, shirts, coats, bottles, glasses, plates, shoes, a knife, bullets .... All wars seem to be filled with things: things to sell, things to steal and have stolen, things to lose. There must be a great many things in and on the wagon. Perhaps it is even bursting with things, at least until after Swiss Cheese's death. If the audience is to remember that Mother Courage has been "disfigured and deformed beyond recognition" by business and by the war-by war business-she must be in control of enough business for it to be potentially profitable. She is selling, not begging. She expects to make money. Perhaps there are shelves of cups and glasses kept in place by a protective strip of wood. Neat. Orderly. Contemporary designers have to work hard to suggest to their audiences that being in business relates to becoming" disfigured and deformed" because our political and economic systems tell us that being in business is good. Brecht's socialism distrusted business and his Marxism believed that capitalism would destroy itself. What audience members see when they look at the wagon should help them to realize that Mother Courage thinks more of her wagon (her business) than of her children, and to suspect that this attitude will destroy her children and deprive her of everyone she cares for; that she will, in her own businesslike way, perpetuate the war. She takes better care of her wagon than she does of her children. It is well-stocked, tidy, in good repair, clean, jaunty even, at the beginning. Now, what happens to the wagon in the course of the play? 

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Subject: The century and/or Decade to Which the Wagon Belongs
"Neither the play nor the stage production would be required to maintain any consistent illusion of actuality." (Gassner) 
"The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason." (Brecht) 
Will the audience think more than they feel if the wagon appears to come from "between 1624 and 1636" and the illusion is that we are in the early seventeenth century? Would a wagon from 1941 (remembering stories of the Okies pulling their broken-down, out-of-gas Ford and Chevy trucks toward California) be more apt to make them think about the issues raised by the play? Could the wagon have any sort of relationship with the 1990s? Is it perhaps some visual combination of the three? What about: A metal frame and tongue, wagon bed and upright structure of wood, fabric curtains or cover, rubber truck tires? 
Remember: before you can start a thought conversation with a text, you must first put things into your head to think about: facts from the playscript, everything you can recall from your own memory that might relate to the play, and a selection of new information and experiences. Be patient. Don't push too hard and don't expect to come up with neat answers in a short time. N eat answers may well appear (several of them usually do), but it takes time for them to crystallize. 
Text Analysis and Theatre Education 
Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world." He, whose imagination was fuller and most extensive, embraced the universe as his city. and distributed his knowledge, his company. and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot. (Michel de Montaigne, "On the Education of Children, 1579-80") 
Come to the theatre. Did you see the last moments of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables? The residents of a pension sit in frigid isolation under the harsh 

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lights of their dining room. Events bring them to feel some sympathy for each other, and the angel of compassion enters the room. The harsh light dims. The tiny table lamps, unnoticed in the brightness, now cast their warm pools. The room, the characters, and the play are charmed as the curtain falls. 
A good idea. Whose idea? The author's? The director's? Even--God forbid-the actors? Why not? Must ideas like this be the sale property of someone who knows how to calculate voltage drop in a series circuit?(David Hays, Light on the Subject) 
Until well into the twentieth century, the relatively small percentage of people in the United States who received higher or postsecondary education studied virtually the same subjects, read the same authors, and discussed similar ideas, both historical and contemporary. No educated person in the early years of this century could have overlooked Darwin's theory of natural selection, Freud's exploration of the unconscious, or Marx and Engels's predictions of economic revolution. It would not have occurred to an educated person at that time to explain why he or she was not familiar with major social and intellectual issues of the day by saying: "But I'm an art major. I never took courses in biology or political science." Three-quarters of a century later, with more than half of all Americans earning degrees past high school, educated people no longer share a common intellectual background, have not read the same books, and are much less aware of ideas and discoveries in fields other than their own than educated people were seventy-five years ago. Most college students in the United States concentrate their undergraduate studies in specialized areas, such as accounting, environmental science, historic preservation, computer science, studio art, and so on. The subjects that once constituted the bulk of the undergraduate curriculum have been reduced to a dozen or so required courses that are referred to as the general education, or core, curriculum. Even in those liberal arts institutions that retain a strong commitment to a curriculum with a healthy dose of literature, critical thinking, art, math, and science, most students expend far more mental energy on their area of specialization than on the "gen-ed" requirements. It is all too common for Americans with undergraduate and graduate degrees from excellent colleges and universities to be completely unaware of ideas and theories from other fields. Even within individual disciplines, specialization has 

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become so intense that someone who has concentrated on a subspecialty may have no idea of what is going on in other areas of the same field. 
The changes in theatre education in American colleges and universities from the 1960s to the present mirror what has occurred in the academy at large. Theatre classes were first offered in American institutions of higher learning in the 1920s and achieved academic legitimacy by being taught under the auspices of English departments. The emphasis was on dramatic literature and in some places playwrighting. Play production remained precisely what it had been since the flowering of universities in the Middle Ages: an extracurricular activity. Over the next two decades, however, autonomous theatre departments gradually emerged on the higher education scene and produced plays under their own sponsorship and guidance. With only a few exceptions, however, the focus of theatre studies in most of these institutions was academic, rather than on the performance or professional aspects of theatre. 
A revolution in theatre education began in the 1960s, hand in hand with the other social and political revolutions associated with that explosive decade. The emphasis of many theatre programs changed from teaching a wide cross section of students about theatre to training a highly motivated group of students to do theatre. Undergraduate and graduate theatre departments sprang up allover the country, often aligning themselves with studio art and music performance programs (which were undergoing a similar professionalization). Some theatre departments began to call themselves professional theatre training programs. The master of fine arts, or MFA, degree was born and became recognized as a "terminal" degree for college and university teachers who taught in the fine and performing arts. Enrolling in MFA programs has taken the place of apprenticeships and conservatory training for young professional artists. Only a limited number of universities had ever offered the Ph.D. in any branch of theatre studies, and some of these programs were abandoned in favor of the MFA. At universities where Ph.D. programs in theatre continued to operate, academics and professionals tended to settle down on opposite sides of the philosophical-and pedagogical-fence, each group looking down its collective nose at the other. 
On the undergraduate level, two approaches to theatre education were devised. Although the actual requirements of both approaches vary a good deal from institution to institution, they remain the primary options for students who wish to major in theatre. Students can attend a school offering a 

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theatre major within a broad-based bachelor of arts program (BA), or enroll in a college or university where they can earn a bachelor of fine arts degree (BFA). In BA programs the number of theatre courses theatre majors can take is limited, usually less than a quarter of the total number required for graduation, and they are expected to explore other disciplines as well as to complete a fairly hefty number of general education requirements, which usually include classes in literature, history, mathematics, science, philosophy, and a foreign language. In BFA programs, students become theatre specialists, taking half or even more of their classes in theatre subjects. The general education requirements are less rigorous than those for the BA, and often do not include mathematics, philosophy, or a foreign language. 
Along with these changes in theatre education, a professional theatre revolution was also in progress. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, theatre decentralized away from New York City and Broadway, and into dozens of large and middle-sized cities from coast to coast. The regional theatre movement of these decades altered the professional lives of thousands of young actors, directors, playwrights, and designers. No longer did they troop like lemmings to New York or Los Angeles to seek their fortunes; instead, they found challenging, gainful employment in Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford. The establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1964 brightened the financial and spiritual future for professional, nonprofit theatres, and over the next twenty years the number of companies increased from half a dozen to more than two hundred. As regional theatres attracted larger and larger audiences, the quality of physical productions soared, and by the mid-1970s there were jobs for more and more well-trained theatre artisans and technicians as well as for actors, directors, and designers. Many theatre departments responded by increasing curriculum specialization on the graduate and undergraduate levels. 
Today, undergraduate theatre students can choose to concentrate on performance, design, or technology, even in some BA programs, while BFA programs have devised curricula that allow intensive specialization. Among the most extreme, for example, are institutions at which an eighteen-year-old theatre major can embark on a four-year professional theatre training program in costume technology that will include fewer than a dozen courses in any subject other than those directly related to building costumes and costume properties. In other words, a student can earn a BFA degree in theatre, 

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with a specialty in costume technology, without ever performing in or directing a play, stage managing, designing a set, or focusing a light. And it goes almost without saying that literature and history in general, and theatre literature, criticism, and history in particular, have a very small place, or no place, in many undergraduate professional theatre training curricula. In some BFA programs, theatre history is taught only in relationship to the plays that are produced each term; if Moliere does not turn up on the production calendar during your four years, you could easily graduate without knowing anything about Moliere's plays, his theatre, or his place in the theatre continuum. Not only are theatre students, like most students today, strangers to ideas from the traditional disciplines like philosophy and history, as well as newer fields like neurobiology and computer science, they are equally unaware of the important role theatre has played in human history and cannot discuss even the most recent events taking place in the American theatre. 
Students with specialized theatre educations become specialized theatre professionals with admirable artistic and technical skills. Specialization is most intense in curricula created to train theatre technicians, but it is also intense in theatre design programs. Designers learn to draw and paint beautifully and to understand and manipulate the elements of design and the principles of composition. Costume designers explore and manipulate the effects of clothing on the human body; scenic designers alter the geometry of the stage space; lighting designers work subtle magic on audience emotions. Many of them, however, do their work in a peculiar sort of isolation from the play and from the theatrical event. Yes, they are intensely concerned with their own work and the development of their own individual skills, and yes, they are serious and hard-working, but in general, they have little or no passion for the theatre at large or even, in many cases, the theatrical event for which they do their individual jobs to perfection. They are only vaguely aware of what is happening in theatres across the country-a new play in Chicago, a designer in Boston who has given a new look to an old opera, a theatre in San Francisco producing contemporary Japanese plays. They know nothing at all about recent theatre history in their own country, and only the most basic facts about general theatre history in the West. Worst of all, very few of these designers have any sense of theatre as a cultural force or as a response to basic human instincts. Too many American theatre designers are working harder than ever to make technically proficient "theatre, but to no particular purpose. 

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Yet the most basic purpose of all theatrical events is to create intellectual, social, political, and emotional connections between theatre and people. The specific nature of these connections is unique to live theatre, and no other art or entertainment can match its immediacy or intensity. Theatre designers who make their own individual connections with the plays they design have an important· role to play in invoking and realizing the power of performances to connect deeply with audiences. The text analysis in which they engage is intense, bold, creative, far-reaching, and closely reasoned. Designers who approach texts in these ways learn and grow with every design. They look for and find whatever they need to know, when they need to know it. Text analysis may at first be more difficult for those designers with a more specialized than liberal education, but then, nobody who works in the theatre expects the job to be easy. 
I end this section with three comments from a discussion about the lack of background, mostly literary, in the work of young theatre designers. (All are from "A Roof Without a House," Theatre Crafts, March 1985.) 
Unless stiff requirements steer students in the right direction, only an ambitious minority will select a semester of the seventeenth -century literature, nineteenth-century European history, early twentieth-century psychology, and Renaissance music. But those are precisely the resources a future stage designer will need when handed La Boheme or The Revenger's Tragedy. (Susan lieberman) 
When Ali Nagler spoke at Yale about Don Giovanni last year, the students didn't seem very responsive; they didn't ask questions. So I asked, "Okay, how many of you know Don Giovanni?" And not one of them did. Then I asked, "How many of you know Moliere's Don Juan?" And not one of them did. Then I asked, "How many of you know Man and Superman?" About half of them had read it. Finally I asked, "How could you read Don Juan in Hell without associating it with Don Juan or Don Giovanni?" Well, they hadn't really thought about it. (Ming Cho Lee) 
We have created a Russian Easter egg-very beautiful on the outside, but no content inside. A drawing might be gorgeous, but will it help the actor? Does it express the play? Because of the way young designers are taught, they have no . resources to deal with anything other than the crust of things. (John Jensen) 

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