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

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.

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.

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.

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!

They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

I’m my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.

If you wish to find Love, don’t look for the object of love but rather for the source of love. There you will find the Beloved.

In mutual love the lover not only wants the happiness of his beloved; but has an eye towards his own happiness also.

The Beloved is inside you and also inside me. You know the tree is hidden inside the seed. Let your arrogance go. None of us has gone far. Inside love there is more power than we realize.

Listen to me brother! bring the vision of the Beloved in your heart.

Thee, Son Beloved! of plural Unity Essential part, made flesh that mad’st all worlds.

In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and abhorrent sectarianism threatens a civil war.