Come now, what masques, what dances shall we have,
To wear away this long age of three hours
Between our after supper and bedtime?
—Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Lord, Mr. Dangle, why will you plague me about such nonsense? . . . Isn’t it sufficient to make yourself ridiculous by your passion for the theater without continually teasing me to join you?
—Mrs. Dangle, in Sheridan’s The Critic

Quite recently, I was taken to the ballet—twice, within a brief space of time. The friend who took me to see a performance of the MacMillan Romeo and Juliet at American Ballet Theatre goes rather frequently to the ballet herself and knew when she invited me that I had not been to the ballet in years.

Actually, she didn’t know the half of it: apart from Coppelia, I couldn’t remember ever having seen a “story” ballet before. The awful thing was that I didn’t know how to read it. It wasn’t just a question of vocabulary: I didn’t know the rules of the language. All sorts of questions kept worrying me—questions, I knew, that could only occur to someone who’d virtually never been to the ballet in her adult life and was looking at it with a theatrical eye.

What determined the character of a Juliet or a Tybalt, I wanted to know: choreography? production? performance? Could you have, for instance, a sultry Juliet, an ambivalent Tybalt—or were her innocence and his arrogance an