Theater is divisive because of what is has to do: allow for impossible conversations without airing dirty laundry—gossip about humanity without gossiping about humans. It should be blisteringly painful at moments—without being acute or particular; it has to prune away our idealizations without killing the whole bush. It has to point out the gracelessness in us while leaving room for grace.
There’s something about the pivot point between summer and fall, when you have the first chill in the air, that, for me, is inextricably linked with the beginning of school and a lust for reading; I will never and can never miss academic life—but I do miss the first night in the library; I miss the immanence of new knowledge, the possibility that the mind might reconstruct itself from the ground up.