“I don’t think of myself as a critic or teacher either, but simply — and at the obvious risk of disingenuousness — as someone who teaches, writes drama criticism (and other things) and feels that the American compulsion to take your identity from your profession, with its corollary of only one trade to a practitioner, may be a convenience to society but is burdensome and constricting to yourself.”

..."People still go to the theater to identify with characters, not having been apprised of their death,” he once wrote, with sardonic wonder, of mainstream theater audiences. Plays, he said in “The Making of Modern Drama” (1974), his most ambitious and arguably his finest work, should be “enactments of consciousness” that free the mind from traditional perceptions. What he opposed, he said, was “the turning of dramatic art into culture — something to use as a storehouse of ‘higher’ feelings and recognitions.”