In the cubicle with Mel Gussow
-
- October
- 20
I’ve got some things taped to my rarely visited cubicle that bring me joy when I see them: Pictures of my kids when they were tiny, my daughter Bridget’s charcoal rendering of a tree, and this quote from the NYT obit of Mel Gussow, a theater critic who was a playwright’s champion.
It never fails to make me smile and the observation is so keen:
“In a lecture, called “The Role of the Critic,” Mr. Gussow told an anecdote about an actor who played the doctor who appears only very briefly in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Mr. Gussow said the actor described the play this way: “It’s about this doctor who takes this crazy lady off to an asylum.”
“It taught him much, he said, about what it means to be a player, of any sort, in the theater. “For an actor or a playwright, even a critic,” Mr. Gussow concluded, “one must always believe that what one does is important.”
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on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 4:24 pm by Peter D. Kramer.
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Peter D. Kramer
