As for why I prefer to write for theater rather than for cinema, it is the interaction. I read a really good article that speaks about
what is so special about theater. In it, the star of the Assassins revival, Denis O'Hare, says,
“The reciprocal nature of theater doesn’t exist in film.” To illustrate this dynamism that only live theater can provide, O’Hare shared two anecdotes, one stemming from the performance of Golda’s Balcony he attended. When Tovah Feldshuh (as Golda Meir) read the names of the Nazi concentration camps, someone in the audience—a Holocaust survivor or the relative of a victim, O’Hare surmised—groaned. “The air was charged,” O’Hare said. The theatergoer’s reaction made the horror of the camps “that much more real.”
The immediate reaction you can hear during live theater is part of the magic that I would greatly miss with cinema. Not only that but the reaction to what you write can change in different performances. I'm sure Shaw would have loved to know that the collective meaning of
Major Barbara changed in the period immediately following 9/11.
[Denis O'Hare's] other story related to how theater audiences were affected by 9/11. At the time O’Hare was appearing in Roundabout Theatre’s Major Barbara, Shaw’s play about an arms dealer that, in O’Hare’s words, posits that “we cannot choose who has the moral authority to use weapons.” The comedy was getting laughs prior to September 11th, but afterward the audience reacted to it as “a deadly serious polemic,” he said. The experience convinced O’Hare that while theater seemed trivial compared to Ground Zero rescue work, “we were filling an incredibly vital need: to entertain, discuss and educate.”
My guess is that screenwriters get a satisfaction out of the reviews of their work, out of how the actors and directors react, and even in what they see at the theater, but I can't imagine it is nearly as fulfilling as theater.
