The ideals of “high modernism” in theatre really confuses me, especially those of Beckett. While I understand the motives of moving away from realism and having to compete with the new medium of film/movies, what I dont understand is why they would try to make plays more of a “reading” experince for the audience? If you look at the background of the playwrights in the high modernists era (ex: Yeats, Pirandello, Elliot, and Beckett), it seems as if they were using their knowedgle of writing novels or poems and just converting that into plays. However, in my opinion its almost as if they were eliminating the empahsis of the performance itself, which is what some people believe is what makes a play a finish product, opposed to just dialouge written on a page.