The Player of Comic Roles, along with the Manager and the Dramatic Poet, is staging a production of Faust for a German theater in the “Prelude on the Stage” scene. Like the Dramatic Poet, he too is something of an artist, though he knows that posterity cannot enjoy his performances because they occur only in the present. He is also like the Manager in advocating for entertainment value, in giving people what they want, though with less of an emphasis on action and stage effects and more of an emphasis on representing the gamut of human experience.