“These words from this essay ought to be engraved on the walls of every theatre in the land: 

'If the driving force in theater is its search for spiritual meaning, then it's natural that one of its fruits is spiritual experience.  Theater is well suited to such pursuits because it is the one art that can encompass all the others in itself, concentrating the full spectrum of thought and feeling into the power of a unified expression. Every part of life can be included in its spectacle of music, scenery, song, and dance:  Dionysus is not only the god of wine and comedy, but also the god of tragedy and Lord of Death.  The theater may be tawdry and bankrupt, a stepchild to the movies, a soap box for political scolders and moral libertines, the sanctuary of sofa drama and hysterical therapy, the most boorish and bourgeois of all artistic institutions; but it is also the chosen art form of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Yeats.’ 

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- Robert Brustein, Director of American Repertory Theatre, on The Meaning of Ecstasy