A Play Has To Work

In the long term, critics don't matter at all. In the short term they give an extra push, or conversely give you more to push against; but favorable reviews won’t save a play for long if the audiences don’t like it, and vice versa. The play has to work. It has to be truthful. The audience must believe. But the play is also a physical mechanism. Getting that mechanism to work takes an awful lot of time and preoccupation. The way music comes in and out, lights vary, etcetera. When you’ve got all that right you can get back to the text. Otherwise, the fact that it seems right on paper won’t help you.