It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn’t.

The actor doesn’t merely command the stage, he seems to own it by divine right.

If Obama needs to be criticized, I will criticize him. There’s a tremendous amount of excitement about him. And a corollary of that is, as we’re learning, from newspapers and magazines that are going into overdrive reprinting Obama editions, etc.

The only truly shocking thing about last Tuesday’s election is that the Democrats didn’t do far worse, or as badly as they deserved.

The truth is that a lot of plays aren’t political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there’s a crisis, a national crisis.

I’m always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those ‘good Germans’ who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly 'changed everything,' slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

To me, the fun part of both jobs is to always try to push the discussion and debate forward in some way. The most fun part of being a theater critic for the Times was always to try and champion something that maybe other people didn't like, or that was produced under obscure circumstances or had to fight for its life. And I would say in the column what I try to do is in some ways related in that I'm trying to fight for a point of view. I'm not trying to be a kingmaker in either job, and don't want to be, and shouldn't be.