Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.
– George P. Baker
Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama.
– George P. Baker
But what is drama? Broadly speaking, it is whatever by imitative action rouses interest or gives pleasure.
– George P. Baker
Don't let prejudices, moral or artistic, cause prejudgments: keep an open mind as you read.
– George P. Baker
Drama read to oneself is never drama at its best, and is not even drama as it should be.
– George P. Baker
Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.
– George P. Baker
In all the great periods of the drama perfect freedom of choice and subject, perfect freedom of individual treatment, and an audience eager to give itself to sympathetic listening, even if instruction be involved, have brought the great results.
– George P. Baker
In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.
– George P. Baker
In the best farce to-day we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.
– George P. Baker
No drama, however great, is entirely independent of the stage on which it is given.
– George P. Baker
Once the idea was widespread that tragedy and comedy differ essentially in material.
– George P. Baker
Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
– George P. Baker
Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.
– George P. Baker
Sensitive, responsive, eagerly welcomed everywhere, the drama, holding the mirror up to nature, by laughter and by tears reveals to mankind the world of men.
– George P. Baker
The drama is a great revealer of life.
– George P. Baker
The drama possesses a great literature growing out of an eternal desire of the races.
– George P. Baker
The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
– George P. Baker
The moving picture show, too, is at best drama stripped of everything but motion.
– George P. Baker
There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his audience.
– George P. Baker
To try to hit public taste in the drama is like trying to hit the bull's-eye of a rapidly shifting target on a very foggy day.
– George P. Baker
To-day, then, the drama has become cosmopolitan.
– George P. Baker
We do not kill the drama, we do not really limit its appeal by failing to encourage the best in it; but we do thereby foster the weakest and poorest elements.
– George P. Baker
What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.
– George P. Baker
When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.