Playwrights like to talk ...
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Lucky for us. We get to drink from the fount of wisdom that our elders... oh forget it! Here are some observations and insights from some smart people. It's the world seen from the perspective of a wide range of working playwrights. And as useful as these succinct extracts can be, there is a lot to be gained from going to the source material and reading the quote in its original context, which is often part of a meaningful dialogue. I just think the least you can ask for from art is that it be at least as interesting as life. Art that takes a little tiny, tiny, tiny piece of life and just sort of sits there—I just don't want to spend two hours in that little tiny room. [www.sffringe.org]
I think that theatrical language should be rich and strange. I don't think it should be less interesting than ordinary language, certainly. [www.sfgate.com]
Character is language, language is character. How people speak not just reveals them, but I think creates them. [www.sfgate.com]
The most important things I've learned about collaboration are these: Check your ego at the door; Be gentle but honest; Don't try to force it; Split everything evenly; Chinese fortune cookies after lunch usually hold the answer to the problem you were trying to solve before lunch; Decaf coffee only. [www.ahrensandflaherty.com]
If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee. [www.vcu.edu] I think it is probably better to be awake, sober, and drug-free. I suspect those three conditions are probably helpful. But beyond that, I just have to feel like writing. I'm not one of these people who goes to the desk every single day and writes. I wait until my head gets filled with stuff and I have to get it out of my head. [www.nycplaywrights.org] At least in theory, any play that can’t be done with a couple of chairs and a lightbulb has something wrong with it. [The Playwright’s Voice]
If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee. [www.vcu.edu] Writing dialogue reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend, the playwright Sidney Kingsley. I knew that Sidney was writing a play so I asked him how he was doing. He said, “I’m almost finished, I’ll start writing the dialogue tomorrow.” So the dialogue comes after everything else has been mapped out.” [Creating Unforgettable Characters] The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play. [www.thinkexist.com]
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed. [www.thinkexist.com]
A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it. [www.thinkexist.com]
All the time I write I find I am writing, partly indeed to express what I know, feel, and see, but even more to test the truth of my knowledge, feelings, and vision.... I see myself as a practitioner of an art which is both Public and Exploratory... [quoted in Theatre Language]
It is the job of the playwright to demonstrate the complexity, to try to elucidate it by the clarity of his demonstration. But to go further and start deciding for his audience I think is rather presumptuous. [quoted in Theatre Language] When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. [www.creativequotations.com]
It is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams. [The Theory of the Modern Stage]
The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa. [The Crafty Art of Playmaking]
If you don’t have the initial inspiration, put down the pen, put the pencil back in the jar, switch off the computer and go and dig the garden instead. [The Crafty Art of Playmaking]
Why do we call a play “a play”? Why do we use the same word for a play as we do for playing the piano and children at play? So if it isn’t fun, in the broadest sense, if it isn’t engaging, there’s no point in doing it. [www.nac.ca]
I’ll be in a situation and it’ll stay with me in some horrible way, and that’s what gets me writing. [The Playwright’s Voice]
I love listening to overheard dialogue and taped stuff. Watergate was entirely responsible for my wanting to be a playwright. I can locate it all in the transcripts of those guys going, “Let’s call Dean and, you know...” [The Playwright’s Voice]
I think I will probably always think of myself first and foremost as a writer. That’s a more intimate experience [than directing]. It’s lonely, it’s hard, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing, you know what I mean? [www.celebritywonder.com]
Words are the only thing for me and there’s not enough of them. Yes, that’s it! Can’t and must! That’s my situation!
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence. [www.whatquote.com]
I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning. [www.whatquote.com]
Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better. [www.whatquote.com]
The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it. [Theatre of the Oppressed]
I mean a lot of work now is ironic and it distances you ... it comments on the work as it happens. It comes out of postmodernism and semiotics and it makes sense – Brecht – kind of like ‘look at what you’re saying. Don’t lose yourself in the story.’ The opposite of that is a writer who draws you in so you do lose yourself. I like the back and forth of it – a moment of humor that lets you step outside, then drama drawing you back in ... [Theatreforté]
Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.” [A Director Prepares]
In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations. [A Director Prepares]
The primary tool in a creative process is interest. To be true to one’s interest, to pursue it successfully, one’s body is the best barometer. The heart races. The pulse soars. [A Director Prepares]
Stereotypes are containers for memory, history and assumption. [A Director Prepares]
By labeling something a work of "genius", the critic, as a spokesperson for the status quo, can undercut the communal nature of the art enterprise. The idea of "genius" is decadent because it is romantic. Capitalist society reveres the notion of genius because it is the greatest manifestation of the "individual." Art for centuries and centuries was a communal enterprise. Now we are meant to be on the look-out for "genius." But true genius cannot be seen (from outside) it can only be experienced. [www.ericbogosian.com]
If you truly believe in the vision or story that you’re telling, then you will do anything to tell your part of that story the best you can. It does not matter if you’re writing it, acting in it, directing it. Working on material that you’re passionate about makes the body, mind, and heart drive to the limits. [New York Theatre Experience]
“Theatre” consists in this: making live representations of reported or invented happenings between human beings, and doing so with a view to entertainment. [Quoted in Playwriting: The Structure of Action]
What I’m most fascinated by is the idea that puppetry, costuming, makeup and characterization all come from the same source. When the storyteller began to characterize, change his voice to say certain lines, dance with certain gestures for the mimesis of characterization, the idea was to represent and bring to bear out of the self another self, another entity. [In Their Own Words]
If satire really works, it’s a mirror.
There was a war going on between my three roles as playwright, actor and faux diva. I finally felt that for the writer to grow, I’d have to keep the diva unemployed for the time being. [www.charlesbusch.com]
To be sensitive is to be in pain every day.
Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an imancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. [www.notable-quotes.com]
And who is interested in knowing my life or yours, my thoughts and your thoughts? Give people people, and not yourself. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions. [www.notable-quotes.com]
I only wanted to show everyone how empty and useless their lives were, so they would all cry, “We must do something.” [Grove New American Theater]
Try not to polish up front. You have worked yourself to death. Keep going, keep going. If it's poorly written, too bad. Keep going. When you have an end, you've got something whole. Then rewrite, rewrite. Polished incomplete things wear you out. [www.nycplaywrights.org]
I'm not ever inclined with any of the plays to say, This is about that, because plays are about the whole event that they are. [www.vcu.edu]
I do enjoy the form of things. I enjoy finding the form that seems best to fit what I'm thinking about. I don't set out to find a bizarre way of writing. I certainly don't think that you have to force it. But on the whole, I enjoy plays that are non-naturalistic and don't move in real time. [www.nytimes.com]
The pull of what the audience wants is always a danger. I have to answer the questions that I have and not reassure the audience about questions they have. There’s always a temptation to lean toward what people want, and a black audience always wants the black person to win. [Women Who Write Plays]
In my head there are women saying, ‘Tell us what you know. We need the information. It won’t offend us.’ Which, as a writer, is what I always need: permission to say the truth, even if it’s not flattering to my group. Even if it’s saying that sometimes we are destroyed by the bad things that happen, and how terrible that is. [Women Who Write Plays]
There is something about the creative process... which is that you can't talk about it. You try to think of anecdotes about it, and you try to explain, but you're never really saying what happened... it's a sort of happy accident. [www.quote.robertgenn.com]
In the theatre, don't sit around waiting for other people to produce your work, produce it yourself. [www.sfsu.edu]
When baby ducks and geese are born, they imprint on the first thing that they see, and that becomes their mother. An audience is like that. They imprint on what you give them in the first few minutes of the play, and they will follow it. In those first moments you can do anything, because hope springs eternal. The lights come up and you've got them—until you start to lose them.... With a play, you're trapped there; it's got to keep giving or people turn on you. They resent you. [www.vcu.edu]
It is certain that there are laws of the drama, since it is an art; but it is not certain what these laws are. [The Art of Dramatic Writing]
Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade. [www.whatquote.com]
Consider the public. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all never, never, never bore the living hell out of it. [www.whatquote.com]
We all have ideas about what writers are supposed to be and what artists are supposed to be, and none of it is true when you actually try to do that and be that person. [Women Who Write Plays]
I think of myself as someone who records history, and not any grand history necessarily. I don’t feel like I need to stand up and say, "Pay attention to me, this is important.” But I do feel that I write about a world which is important.
If I don’t embrace the richness of my culture, what are my options? To write about potatoes? [American Theatre]
Artists are like exiles in the world. We are looking at the world from the outside in order to write about it, to reflect on it. [American Theatre]
Jorge Luis Borges said that books grow. The writer writes the books, but in our interpretation we layer the book in different ways. We layer it with our understanding. In theater, it's what the director brings to the play and how the director shapes the material and brings a different focus that might enhance the story. [Bomb Magazine]
It's something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It's almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader. [Bomb Magazine]
www.standingpoem.com ©2008 Cass Brayton |
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