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Terry Teachout Quotes

American - Critic | February 6, 1956 -

Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.'

Education Art Experience School High

Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.

Will Estate License His Plays

The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions.

Play Product Instructions Finished

A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.

People Performance Process Play Will

I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so.

Work Judge Meaning Results Play Say

Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.

Work Great American Enjoy Know Debt

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

Masterpiece Yes Original Being Able

I suspect that most playgoers don't understand how inexact a science literary translation is. Even the simplest of lines may lend itself to multiple renderings.

Science Understand Lines May Even

No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.

Path Mountain Performance Perfect Up

I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.

Attitude Great Depression Parents

Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.

Life Good Age Children Culture View

As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

Music Dance People Early Late Jazz

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