On the stage it is always now.

Wilder’s line points to a defining feature of theatrical art: performance collapses time into a perpetual present. However historical the setting or however many times a play is repeated, the actor’s speech and action occur as lived events for the audience—irreversible, unfolding “now.” The remark also hints at theater’s peculiar power to make memory, history, and imagined futures feel immediate, and to renew meaning through each performance. In Wilder’s own dramaturgy—often attentive to time, mortality, and the everyday—this idea underscores how the stage can rescue fleeting human experience from abstraction by re-enacting it as present reality.