That is because we have built on the tradition of American theater, which was at one time experimental. If you look at American society in the last 30 years, we have made tremendous changes from the time when I was a young man until now, when I am in my middle age. I don't think there is a theater that has kept up with that change. One of the things that playwrights wrestle with, to my mind, is the influence of television. We cannot go backward.
Television is here.
I think that playwrights are in the process of trying to figure out how to absorb that influence and to make dramatic art out of an influence that wasn't there in the 1920's. They had gone so far into debt to take this writing program that when their two years were up, both of them went out to California just to get work in episodic television to pay off the enormous debt they had incurred. And they are lost because they are both now very successful. They have learned to work in a corporate voice and feel that the theater is elite because it's the voice of one playwright. They like the comfort of working on a half-hour comedy that goes into 50 million homes.