One especially memorable experience for me was working on the Mabou Mines production of Samuel Beckett's Play. I found, during my many viewings, that I experienced the work differently on almost every occasion. Specifically, I noticed that the emotional quickening (or epiphany) of the work seemed to occur in a different place in each performance -- in spite of the fact that all the performance elements such as light, music and words were completely set. This puzzled me. It also made me extremely curious, since traditional theater "works" quite differently... One might say that a classical or traditional play is a machine built in a specific way to make the emotional peak always happen in the places the author intended... It occurred to me then that the emotion of Beckett's theater did not reside in the piece in a way that allowed a complicated process of identification to trigger response....

Beckett's Play doesn't exist separately from its relationship to the viewer, who is included as part of the play's content. This is the mechanism we mean when we say the audience "completes" the work. The invention, or innovation, of Beckett's Play is that it includes us, the audience, in a different way than does the traditional theater. Instead of submitting us to an internal mechanism within the work, it allows us, by our presence, to relate to it, complete it and personalize it. The power of the work is directly proportional to the degree to which we succeeded in personalizing it.

Extending the Beckett theory into other realms, one might venture that art objects -- be they paintings, string quartets, or plays -- don't exist or function by themselves as abstract entities. They function and become meaningful only when there are people present to experience them.... This was a view very much shared by the world of musicians and artists around me. Certainly I had been prepared for it by John Cage's book Silence, which I had read as early as 1962....