Perspective

Every twenty years or so, America remembers it has a theater. There's a surge of interest and youthful talent to the form, like a rush of blood to the head. Then there's a battle royal: The new talents struggle to overthrow the old conventions, and old figureheads, that have made the theater boring; the old ways fight back. (...) What this cyclical pattern means, essentially, is that the American theater, as an institution, never grows up, never evolves a native tradition, never accrues the sense of perspective that comes with maturity.

- Michael Feingold, from the introduction to Grove New American Theater

An interesting idea. It seems to be true that a lot of my contemporaries don't have much perspective on theatrical history. I've been working lately on synthesizing modern writing with more old-fashioned techniques (writing 5-act plays in verse, or 4-act plays), and I'm met with amazed bewilderment. There's a reason old plays work, they have the mechanism to do so, it's just a matter of blowing the dust off, and discarding what is no longer relevant.