“I have received hostile voice mail messages and e-mails. They are often anonymous, I’m sad to say, as anonymous messages are delivered only by very low forms of human life, in my opinion.”

It’s nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere – on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.

EVERY SINGLE DANCER, SINGER and BAND MEMBER is a BRILLIANT SOLO ARTIST

I’ve seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That’s the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

Be prepared to have the breath knocked out of you.

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging … in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set.

Laramie’ often brings to mind ‘Our Town,’ the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire.

The cliche was always that ‘everybody’s a critic,’ but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover – somewhere in the thickets of the Internet – reactions to shows from people who’ve seen them in previews.

Cyndi Lauper knows how to work a crowd.

Rage properly channeled can definitely give birth to good even great theater. Disgust, a more passive and distancing emotion, is far less likely to. Would you rush to a play called Look Back in Queasiness?

The eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

I don’t get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.

Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.

Oh, that dog! Ever hear of a German Shepherd that bites its nails? Barks with a lisp? You say, “Attack!” And he has one. All he does is piddle. He’s nothing but a fur-covered kidney that barks.

There should be no censorship of mail.

They’re calling me. I’m getting nonstop e-mails and calls now from people that have been scammed by Donald Trump. And their stories are heartbreaking.

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.

It would have been better if the United Nations had sent a team to Mali right away to mediate between the government and the rebels. But where is the political initiative?