For those who haven't seen this yet, it was posted on the ASTR list this morning.
George Cram Cook, 1918: "Seven of the Provincetown Players are in the army or working for it in France, and more are going. Not light-heartedly now, when civilization itself is threatened with destruction, we who remain have determined to go on next season with the work of our little theatre. It is often said that theatrical entertainment in general is socially justified in this dark time as a means of relaxing the strain of reality, and thus helping to keep us sane. This may be true, but if more were not true--if we felt no deeper value in dramatic art than entertainment--we would hardly have the heart for it now. One faculty, we know, is going to be of vast importance to the half-destroyed world--indispensable for its rebuilding--the faculty of creative imagination. That spark of it which has given this group of ours such life and meaning as we have is not so insignificant that we should now let it die. The social justification which we feel to be valid now for makers and players of plays is that they shall help keep alive in the world the light of imagination. Without it the wreck of the world that was cannot be cleared away and the new world shaped."