THE MASTER CRITIC OF DRAMA IN CLASSICAL GREECE HAS A THING OR TWO TO SAY ABOUT STORY, STILL.

We bundle the dog into the car, my husband and I, and fill up the trunk: books for one sister, the teapot my mother wanted, an article for my father, something for the baby. The trip down will take us two hours, three in heavy traffic, and the familiar terrain — the cattle on the hillsides, the billboards, the iron-worked toll bridge — slips by as we play our versions of Botticelli and Ghosts. 

A long-form piece

A meditation on our kind as storytellers

Something there is, in us, that seems always to seek narrative. Outside, the children play and as they play they tell stories, adapting those character roles they have observed in their own lives (the mommy, the daddy, the little girl, the baby), as well as those they’ve heard and seen in books and movies, weaving new scripts for their characters, trying on roles and identities, writing their lives. Their play is in this sense not formless: they cast it within the bounds of a narrative, though their narratives tend to be episodic. Children’s play is all about stories.