I agree what you say about the word "art" - several times during this discussion I've felt that when I've said "art", people have equated it with "my idea of good art". It just doesn't make any sense to me to call art "bad" or "good".
That bit to AB was written hastily, and "essence" especially was a bad choice of word. Excuse the muddiness - I'll clarify: What is embodied in your play are all your choices - starting from selecting the theme/subject, creating the characters, inventing the action and dialogue, additional instructions for performance, sets, editing the text into the final running order, etc. When watching or reading it, what I am contemplating is your series of choices - your creative process - such as it is embodied in the final published work. If you agree with me that the reason you keep writing is the pleasure you derive from making all these choices (as Armando seemed to be saying about his own work), you should be able to see the absurdity of saying that aesthetic experience originates in "the work". My aesthetic pleasure originates in your creative action. I can't conceive of how it's "in the process" for the painter, and then somehow not "in the process" for the viewer. And that's what Croce says here - I'll quote literally this time: "How could that which is produced by a given activity be judged a DIFFERENT activity? The critic may be a small genius, the artist a great one () but the nature of both must remain the same. To judge Dante, we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well understood that empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we; but in that moment of contemplation and judgement, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one thing." And Max Raphael - literally: "Art and the study of art lead from the work of art to the process of creation. The work of art holds man's creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which they can again be transformed into living energies." I'm not asking you to subscribe to this point of view, but I am asking you to understand what it means - all I'm saying is that in my experience, this gets very close to what an a.e. is. Your mileage may vary.
