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During a substantial interruption of my graduate education in theatre, I left academia and became a member of a vaguely leftish Roman Catholic religious order—the Paulist Fathers. During that time, I was exposed to various threads of philosophical and theological thought and had novel experiences. Always a big talker, I was forced to more than just talk about serving the poor and broken. I actually had to do it, if in a very limited way. I helped serve meals at a nursing home, visited sick people, took mentally ill or addicted homeless people for walks from a shelter in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. These experiences, along with the reading and course work, added an inflection to my long-standing enthusiasm for Aristotle, and for the philosophers Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger.
In this book, for the first time in my own professional life as a theatre professor and researcher, I have tried to bring together my theatre practice and my existential problems and speculations. Like a piece of splintered wood, the result is no doubt far from perfect, but may prove stimulating when handled.