George P. Baker Quotes
Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.
Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama.
Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.
When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.
We do not kill the drama, we do not really limit its appeal by failing to encourage the best in it; but we do thereby foster the weakest and poorest elements.
In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.
In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.
Drama read to oneself is never drama at its best, and is not even drama as it should be.
But what is drama? Broadly speaking, it is whatever by imitative action rouses interest or gives pleasure.
Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
