Explore "The Play's the Thing" by Gelett Burgess on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Would you rather see a good play performed by poor actors, or a poor play done by good actors? " asked Celestine.
As a professor of the romantic view of life and a "ghost-seer," there is but one answer to the question. "The play's the thing! " Acting is at best a secondary art -- an art, that is, of interpretation, though we as critics judge it of itself alone. But, to an idealist, no play ever is, or can be, perfectly performed. As we accept the conventions of stage carpentry, impossible cottages, flat trees, "property" rocks, misfit costumes and tinsel ornament, so we must gloss over the imperfections of the players, and accept their struttings and mouthings as the fantastic accessories of stage-land. No actor that ever lived ever acted throughout a whole drama as a sane human being would act. We are used to thinking the contrary, but the compression of time and space prevents verisimilitude. A play is not supposed to simulate life except by an established convention. Every art has its medium and its limitation. It is indeed a limitation that makes art possible.