Clurman, who had the mind of a critic, cared more about the meaning of the text as revealed through action. “A play is not constructed on lines of dialogue,” he wrote a few years later. “A play is fundamentally a series of actions. A character enters a room: what is essential to know is not what he says … but what he wants, what made him enter the room, and what he intends to do to get what he wants.”
