After a preview of George Tabori’s Flight into Egypt, Harold Clurman wrote that he found himself less interested in whether the play would be successful. He reported that he hardly cared what he "thought" of it.

Instead:

While I watched it my mind registered certain objections – the uncertainly articulated theme confusing a plot line that might be considered trite; what was important to me was the fact that I was enjoying a certain relationship to what I saw that could hardly be defined in terms of opinion. It was a sense of contact with a living thing – noticeably imperfect – hence an experience that was pleasurably ambivalent. Only through such contact could I know anything about the play.

The experience of the play – the sense of each actor on the stage, their struggle with the material which was suggestive and intrinsically absorbing – was being driven from me by something that was not essentially of the theatre. It is true that part of the pleasure of the theatre is the arena-spectacle aspect of it – the who-will-win excitement of a sports event. But what is most characteristic of the theatre experience is the joy of looking into a strange, imaginative world, and observing it with more concentration, love and curiosity than we do our workaday activities. This essential pleasure we are being increasingly robbed of by the cash-register or race-track climate which pervades our playhouses. The severity of our theatre audiences before the signal has been given them by the press, rumor and gossip that it is all right for them to enjoy a play is not at all critical severity. Criticism bespeaks awareness, sensitivity, discrimination as to the nature of one’s feeling, above all and to begin with, an openness to the senses and the heart. Our critical severity is a commercial reflex: we don’t want to be fooled – we must like or praise only what is accredited. That is why we have so much “criticism” in superlatives of praise or blame – both equally distorted. And the tendency of our official criticism is to imitate our practice rather than to correct it. Our practice consists in treating the theatre as a business rather than as free expression and play – even though the playgoer is not in the theatre for business. Harold Clurman, The Divine Pastime.