I write these words thirteen days after September 11, 2001. For the time being, that date has become as emblematic as B.C. and A.D. Before the 11th, I hesitated to write about writing because I'm basically an actor first, who has adapted—and had published—three of Shakespeare's plays for children, 9 to 17.

The tragedy in New York took place five days before what were to be our final performances of my adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring...23 children. The director and I discussed canceling the two final performances as inappropriate for the time. But we ultimately decided there can't be a more potent antidote to chaos and insanity than Shakespeare...and children. The show went on.

I adapt Shakespeare because I'm hoplessly in love with the language. And I wanted to share my love with my own children...with all children. So I put his vigorous language inside a story theatre frame with sassy, streetwise storytellers speaking in current idiom, filling in the blanks, commenting on the action, propelling the plot. I believed—have always believed—that children could get the plots and a huge chunk of that wildly vibrant, poetic language. And I was right. Fifth-graders are now quoting Lady Mac to each other on the playground.

So, on the final day of our Midsummer, five days after the tragedy, Puck's words—"Lord, what fools these mortals be"—were shockingly current. The teens' naive rebellion, Bottom's innocent arrogance, Aegeus' blustering vengence—all seemed—in Shakespeare's flawless wording—to remind us of our humanness and the imperfect fabric of our characters. Audience members said it was aloe to the week's deep wounds. They could laugh legitimately for the first time since breathing had stopped the Tuesday before.

I'm old enough to have sat suspended through hours of TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination. Walter Cronnkite's words helped me and millions of Americans put definition on what seemed like a windless chasm. And the words of the wonderful writers in the New York Times magazine are pulling me forward through this latest cataclysm. T.S. Eliot said—was it in the Wasteland or The Four Quartets?—"We had the experience but missed the meaning..."

And that's what writing seems to me now: circling the experience again and again until words can nail it—or nearly—a verbal approximation of my experience. To offer another. So they can see how I saw it. And by sharing Eliot's "raid on the inarticulate," we can find commonality.

Experience may be essentially non-verbal and to describe it in words may change the experience. But what else have we got? A billion shared descriptions, trying to get a bull's-eye on experience may finally be—more than ever—what the world needs now.