Peter Schumann's Fire(which I count among the finest plays I have seen), more than any play I have seen has the quality of prayer.

Prayer (for me) is a childhood memory, but I remember things like these: a peopling of death with human forms; a vague yet affecting sense of the scale of things; a notion of the preciousness of life, and of its vulnerability; a touch of fear, since fate is everywhere and has little to do with one's wishes.

I have tended to think of prayer under its aspects of supplication and faith. I am more impressed now by the rationality of prayer. To kneel, to bow one's head, and then to rise is to affirm, in a profoundly rational spirit, one's human place in a world only in small part human. If prayers are addressed to God or to gods they nevertheless signify to other men that we have arrived at some sort of outer limit.