Often, the audience couldn’t even tell if there was a star, or former star, or almost-star, onstage. But she knew: she’d witnessed how something else takes over when a great actor performs. A pedestrian sentence becomes poetry. Words that didn’t make sense on the page sound like an incantation. It made sense, really—theaters began as sacred spaces. Probably the first actors were participating in some ritual sacrifice. There was undeniably ancient power there. How else to account for the fact that people were still producing Euripides?
