It awakened her imagination and excited her about the theater, and it also instructed her, forming the basis for her future art. Another contributor, Beth Henley, has a very different memory: of being greatly disappointed at the ordinariness of a princess in a production, and her dissatisfaction with the actress' performance. Casting is everything. Henley learned at an early age.
Many of the authors detail unconventional encounters with theater that give rise to future inspiration. David Auburn says that he saw his first, truly life-changing production on PBS, a surrealist production of the House of Blue Leaves. This example suggests that theater does not even have to be 'live' to be life-changing; it merely needs to challenge the assumptions of the audience of what is possible. Auburn grew up in a 'theater town' with a local repertory company and an English...
However, being exposed to a unique play that merged farce and tragedy, and spoke to Auburn's own frustrated and longing ambitions, was what transformed him.
The stories of the book suggest that there is no perfect prescription for success in the theater. Many of the playwrights grew up in homes that could be regarded as culturally starved, working-class households. Because of the future playwright's profound need to hear stories and to tell stories, the movies they saw fired their imaginative power. Daniel Patrick Stanley writes that he only saw two plays growing up, the Miracle Worker, and Cyrano de Bergerac, both high school productions, but he realized even then that more than any individual character he identified with the playwright in both productions -- the person orchestrating the overall narrative arc and vision of the work.
