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Dr. Howard Stein on Why Playwrights Must Experiment with the Audience

April 11, 2011 By in Panopticonic, Scientific Aesthetic Tags: , , , 6 Comments

[Author's Note: This is a portion of a speech I gave to the Southeast Theatre Conference in 2000.]

In Robert Aulett’s play, Alberta Radiance, Alberta speaks the opening like, “I have this human life to live, and I don’t know what to do with it.”  The operative word is human, as in “the human condition,” “the human predicament” or “the human comedy.”  When we utter such expressions, we assume the listener knows what we mean, but in my 78 years of living, I have never heard anyone explain what that “human” condition, predicament, comedy or life is.

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Dr. Howard Stein on Golf and the Principle of Consideration

April 5, 2011 By in Urban Semiotic Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

It’s spring, and an old man’s fancy turns to thoughts of golf.  My thoughts concentrate on three conditions that no longer seem to exist, neither in golf nor in the society.  Golf, as the game was designed and expected to be played, is out of sync, out of joint, with the society determined to paralyze the game.

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Dr. Howard Stein on Owning the Subject

February 28, 2011 By in United Stage Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

In a conversation with Robert Chapman many years ago, he who was the co-author of the play, Billy Budd, and the director of the Loeb Theatre at Harvard University, I mentioned a playwright whose work seemed limited to me.

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Thinking About September 11, 2001 & 2002

September 11, 2002 By in Go Inside Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

On September 11 we commemorate the loss of thousands of people to an unnatural disaster. Every year the human race suffers the loss of thousands of people to natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, blizzards, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes — disasters that we have very little chance of avoiding and no one to blame; only Nature.

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Knowing A Man

July 4, 1960 By in Go Inside Tags: , Leave a comment

Author’s Note: Knowing A Man was written in the Summer of 1960 while I was a graduate student at Iowa University. This poem was inspired by an old Columbia University professor of mine who had stopped in Iowa City to see me on his way to visit his father in Mexico City. When I asked him why he was visiting his father, he replied, “My father is very old, and I never knew his dreams.”

You only know a man when you know his dreams.
His troubles tell you only how he lives.
To discover that which is instead of that which seems,
Don’t ask of his pain,
Ask of his dreams.

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