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Harold Clurman was not one to walk out of the theatre and he disapproved of fellow critics who would leave at intermission. No matter how unremarkable the production he would stay, the thought being that something interesting could always happen that mustn’t be missed. That’s a powerful reason for going to the theatre: to experience a moment that mustn’t be missed. A history of theatre-going, such as defined in part the life of Harold Clurman, may be remembered not so much as productions attended but as rare moments happily not missed. It seems to me what makes a moment memorable is that it’s revelatory – revealing something essential about the nature of being human – and that it moves us, greatly. We are affected, even changed, and the affect is what we are happy not to have missed.

Jerzy Grotowski wrote that the actor is someone about whose work the spectator says, I could never do that. Grotowski’s actors could move their ribs individually through breath control – a phenomenon I saw and haven’t forgotten. But I don’t think Grotowski meant technique only, though mastering technique is crucial in setting the actor apart. I think he meant the actor is there to make something awesome happen. There are, perhaps, three kinds of such not-to--be-missed moments and all three startle an audience, making them think, I could never do or be that!

The first kind occurs when something profoundly dramatic transpires, whether comic or serious. It may be simply an image created and is the result of someone’s (or more than one’s) artistic skill. I’d like to submit three examples from recent experience.

 Philadelphia is fortunate to be home to the Academy of Vocal Arts, a conservatory for opera singers that accepts approximately 25 students from around the world each year for four years of tuition-free opera training. Over the course of an academic year, the AVA produces vocal recitals and four operas, one of which, this season, was Tchaikovsky’s scarcely performed Iolanta, the romantic tale of a princess who has suffered blindness from the age of one and whose father, to protect her from knowledge of her disability, has kept her cloistered and unaware of the sense of sight. The opera opens on Iolanta’s sixteenth birthday when she is beginning to sense there is something amiss with her. During the Introduction (written for winds only but at the AVA played solely on piano by music director Ghenady Meirson), Iolanta (performed by Manon Strauss Evard, an attractive and slender French native with lots of gorgeously unruly dark hair) was seated on a hobbyhorse, in a girlish dress, eyes closed, alone on stage. As the chromatic music became more and more ominous her rocking on the hobbyhorse became more and more intense, pitching toward paroxysm, until it seemed she would rock herself out of blindness and into seeing if only she knew what blindness and seeing were. The moment was jarring and unsettling and it persisted, mimicking the jarred mind of Iolanta. It’s heartening when a director (in this case, Peter Kazaras) helps an opera singer inhabit and not just emote a role.

While opera singers likewise study at the renowned Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Curtis also trains musicians. The Curtis Symphony Orchestra in any given year is comprised of 100+ players aged fourteen to twenty-six. The culminating piece of the culminating concert of the season, played in April in Philadelphia’s acoustically superior Verizon Hall, was Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43, conducted by Michael Stern. It was the musicianship combined with the innocent vigor and energy of these young players that melted me, most especially in the last two movements. As the program explained, “from the ashes of the collapsed second movement spring the manic strings of the third,” whose momentum brought on the Finale movement, where a line in the strings, “a swirling storm,” sounding both melancholic and uplifting, made me cry, just weep. In an instant the players ceased being a collection of musicians and became one existence, which, I’ll venture, is the ultimate desire of an orchestra: utter attunement. At the end the youthful musicians looked exhausted, just depleted, and then they stood to the applause and their faces beamed.

In Patrick Shanley’s Doubt now on Broadway Cherry Jones brings a statuesque way of moving to the role of Sister Aloysius -- a stern, determined and courageous traditionalist. To get up from a chair, she crosses her arms across her chest underneath the upper flap of her 1960s nun’s costume, leans forward from the waist as if executing a jackknife, and keeping a straight upper back, rises to full height. In my years of Catholic school with nuns galore, I doubt that I ever saw the precise movement created by Ms. Jones (though nuns would cross their arms under the flap); but through the body of Cherry Jones, the movement seemed universal (as if: but of course, all people in authority since time immemorial have monumentally risen to the occasion) and it seemed inevitable (as if: but of course, Sister Aloysius with her angular disposition must rise that way).

The second kind of memorable moment derives from the presence of the performer rather than from his or her work. This sort of moment accounts for the phenomenon of celebrity; that is, people whom audiences like to look at and want to see more of. Celebrity actors are not necessarily skilful actors. What they are is inordinately attractive people, and in our culture they function somewhat like public sculpture -- to be beheld and appreciated as visual objects. Of course they are not sculpture, they stand in for sculpture, and they are not art, as they do not communicate by metaphor. They are themselves. They are beings of beauty and beauty is sufficient unto itself and not particularly revelatory, which is much the case with the beauty of Yelena in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, wherein she does nothing but move among the other characters and whereby Astrov and Vanya cannot stop looking at her move among them. Naturally, sculpture people populate the media and movies but instances of actors as sculpture may occur on stage as well. Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out is replete with opportunities for memorable moments of actors as sculpture. After all, the majority of the cast is young, athletic and appears naked. The Philadelphia premiere of the play at the Philadelphia Theatre Company in May (directed by James J. Christy) took seriously the opportunity for sculpture when casting actor Jacques Cowart II in the role of Darren, the leading man baseball star who comes out as gay. The audience was treated to various visions of Mr. Cowart’s Greek-like body, which altogether left me without compulsion to attend to his performance. The charisma of his attributes was plenty to pay attention to.

In the third kind of memorable moment the performer links together the previous two, so that inordinate beauty melds with artistic skill. Maybe this third kind is the truly enduring mustn’t-be-missed moment. A quintessential example could be Marlon Brando taking off his shirt as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Somewhere Arthur Miller noted that no one before Tennessee Williams had written a male character for the stage quite like Stanley, someone sexual and not a gentlemen; and certainly no one before Marlon had brought unvarnished male sexuality to the stage, moreover sexuality partially undressed. Arthur Miller was there in the audience of Streetcar and he said that when Marlon took off his shirt women fainted. They fainted not just because he was beautiful but also because he was downright astonishing as a presence and as an actor. Seeing the movie of Streetcar many times over, I can unwaveringly understand how it could have happened that women fainted. I wish I had been there to faint as well.

This year the Academy of Vocal Arts graduated a tenor who if the world is fair will become a star capable of generating moments of the third kind: stunning talent plus stunning presence. He is Dongwon Shin, Korean born, and while still a student, he subbed as Radames in the Opera Company of Philadelphia’s rich production of Aida when the lead tenor fell ill. I heard him sing an aria from I Pagliacci in an AVA concert in April at Verizon Hall and I heard his graduation recital in May. No mistaking, he has not the looks of a young Brando. He’s not at all tall but is rather square and earthbound-looking, yet when he sings he is the real deal, altogether connected – voice and body, heart and mind, self and song -- and his being soars on the wings of a beautiful, powerful voice. Mr. Shin’s unforgettable moment is the crescendo and it causes one’s heart to leap. He seems to reach the rafters of the universe.

It’s unthinkable that anyone would ever remember whole productions though on occasion I remember a whole performance – not the moments but the integrity of its structure. This was so with the work of Jeb Kreager in the Philadelphia premiere of Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events, produced and directed by 1812 Productions in April. His performance was not to be missed because he sidestepped every cliché of characterization into which a less conscientious actor might have slipped. As Ron, he was playing the sort of big, oafish, wisecracking next-door neighbor who isn’t really oafish but is odd. It was the oddness in Mr. Kreager’s characterization that made Ron more complicated than a dumb-ass funny guy and spared the audience even a whiff of formulaic acting.

In the end, it may be simply a concept that’s memorable. In March the Network for New Music in Philadelphia produced Doubletake, which consisted of four original music compositions by four different composers; followed by an intermission; followed by a repeat of each composition, this time played as accompaniment to four different dances. So the procedure was that composers were invited to write a short instrumental dance; choreographers were invited to choreograph a dance to the music; then they came together. I don’t know if this concept has been developed elsewhere, but it ought to become a regular performance feature. It’s inspired! And to the credit of NNW artistic director Linda Reichert, it allows us to hear new music and to hear it differently on the same evening.

There is a theatre moment that was personal to Harold Clurman that did not occur within any of the plays, films, concerts or operas I attended with him. I don’t know in what play it occurred, when or where it happened -- though it was likely in New York -- or who the actor was, but I’ll never forget the story or Harold telling it. The actor was onstage alone and he was supposed to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. He went to the desk drawer and opened it, and apparently the gun wasn't there. He opened all the desk drawers and searched the stage, and still no gun. He began looking for something else on the set with which to kill himself -- maybe a knife, a poker, a rope, some pills -- but there was nothing. He was beside himself with how to have the character take his own life, when, at the end of his wits, he came center stage, stood still, jumped up and flung his head around, came down, and exclaimed, “Oh, I broke my goddam neck,” and fell on the floor, dead. When Harold Clurman told that story he laughed until tears came and I laughed at his laughing and at the story. It’s the description of a truly awesome moment.  The actor’s situation was terrible and his solution was absurd. But his solution was also ingenuous, and it worked because of his commitment to solving a devastating histrionic problem on his own terms, by believing in the impossible and making it possible and therefore believable to all. What a moment!