The number of methodological options available to the contemporary critic of any art is quite intimidating: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Structuralism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, etc. Of course, the situation is even more complicated than this list suggests because on the one hand, each of these headings can be subdivided into more specific, often warring, camps, while on the other hand, some of these headings can be conjoined by hyphens, generating newer positions, like Marxist-Psychoanalytic-Structuralism. You could devote an entire career to mastering all these methods without ever applying one of them.

In this essay, I don't want to invent another perspective. Instead I hope to clarify what I take to-be our ordinary approach to theatrical analysis when it is unaided by the explicitly formulated philosophical or scientific categories of schools of thought like Freudianism or Critical Theory. By divorcing criticism from these larger enterprises, I don't think it ceases to be a cognitive activity.