About Theatre During a Time of War

"It is now often said that theatrical entertainment in general is socially justified in this dark time as a means of relaxing the strain of reality, and thus helping us keep sane. This may be true, but if more were not true, if we felt no deeper value in dramatic art than entertainment -- we could hardly have the heart for it now. One faculty, we know, is going to be of vast importance to the half-destroyed world -- indispensble for its rebuilding -- the faculty of creative imagination. That spark of it which has given this group of ours such life and meaning as we have is not so insignificant that we should let it die. The social justification which we feel to be valid now for makers and players of plays is that they shall help to keep alive the world with the light of imagination. Without it the wreck of the world that was cannot be cleared away, and the new world shaped."
-- George Cram "Jig" Cook -- Provincetown Players, 1918