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... and more playwrights like to talk ...
Be brave enough to look at the ways you need to improve, and call yourself on the ways in which maybe you’re not quite there as a writer. Be brave enough to stick to your vision when other people are not necessarily being supportive of that. [The Playwrights' Center Blog]
We're one of the last handmade art forms. There's no fast way to make plays. It takes just as long and is just as hard as it was a thousand years ago. [ww.vcu.edu]
I didn't sit down and think, I am going to write something about the religious right. I started out by writing something about sexual addiction, and it evolved. [www.vcu.edu]
I did what any good script editor would do, which is to put Michael in greater jeopardy, and sort of beef up his arc. [www.sfgate.com]
A witness is not independent of a crime scene; he is part of what happened. In the same sense, you as a critic are something of a co-creator in the experience of theater ... Criticism is not about writing reviews. It is about witnessing, experiencing, and then creating conversations that hopefully carry on in the world beyond the printed word. [epinions]
Good criticism should breed criticism in the same way that good art begets more art. [epinions]
I have before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of human action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good. [www.en.proverbia.net]
Forcing people to look at you is a radical act. Which is the great thing about theater, if we would only do it. To force people to look. If we were good enough writers and mature enough artists, we could force them to look at society. [Women Who Write Plays]
I’m interested in paralysis as dramatic metaphor. I’m interested in stillness, because that is an almost violent act onstage. [Women Who Write Plays]
I did what any good script editor would do, which is to put Michael in greater jeopardy, and sort of beef up his arc. [xtine.wordpress.com]
I have faith in swinging the magnet of my attention over the random matter of the world and noticing what sticks. Where are the charged particles for me, and what pattern do they make? [xtine.wordpress.com]
Energy is what’s important in terms of relationships. Even if the situation is essentially a passive one, there’s got to be some real presence of energy. This energy comes from the subtext.[Creating Unforgettable Characters]
You have to train yourself to hear behavioral tics in conversation, but more than that you have to hear your own inner voice.”[Creating Unforgettable Characters]
You write what you feel. You write because of that need for expression. You keep it in tune with the times — but you don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways — far easier — to make money. And oh yes! — the lyricist should keep a book for jottings. Ideas occur. Put them down, or they'll get lost. A phrase will spring out of a newspaper, a novel — even out of an encyclopedia. It may be a title, it may be a line, it may be a thought; if it excites you, put it down. [www.dorothyfields.co.uk]
Any little thing that makes you feel less alone is what and why these plays are. [Torch Song Trilogy, Foreword]
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself. [www.whatquote.com]
A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance. [www.notable-quotes.com]
Writing doesn’t always make you rich in money earned, but you can become rich in many other ways. [New York State Writers Institute]
I'm rather wary of any stated thesis like that or of any sense of proselytizing. As an artist, as a writer, I don't consciously do that. I watch and I observe and I try to be as objective and truthful as I can to the human condition I see around me. [www.adherents.com]
I have always been interested in trying to write from and evoke that level of the self that underlies character, that level of consciousness that we all share, upon which is superimposed the accident of character. [In Their Own Words]
I am not interested in making plays that say, Here is the message. I am interested in plays that put into play in exhilarating fashion, all of the different meanings circulating around us. Art is a place where you don’t have to make life’s desperate choices, but can enjoy their interplay. Many people confuse art with life. In conversation with Eric Bogosian [Bomb Magazine]
When I'm not doing something that comes deeply from me, I get bored. When I get bored I get distracted and when I get distracted, I become depressed. It's a natural resistance, and it insures your integrity. [www.quotationspage.com]
I’ve sometimes thought that writing a story is a bit like industrial management. You’ve got something you want done, there’s a plot you want carried out by the characters and the characters have got ideas of their own, just like a workforce, and you have to negotiate with them, persuade them, bully them, bribe them, in order to come to some compromise arrangement where their interests are respected and your interests are respected. [BBC]
Because at least some of the story structure is a given, the work becomes about the meaning of the retelling for a new time. So it has to come as much or as genuinely from the writer's heart as a new play. Plays have been routinely cannibalized and rewritten and reconceived, from King Lear, which was derived from an old play called Lear and His Daughters, to The Relapse, which was re-named and re-worked a century later and became a musical in the 1960's. [www.calshakes.org]
Plays have a shelf life. They are very temporal, and a good theme can come back, but there are always new things to say about it. [www.calshakes.org]
When we go to the theatre we go to be interested by a story of lives living out their conflicts in a concentration of time. We do not go to hear them discuss the matter; we go to see and hear them live it. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
Film and TV has done a lot of damage to theatre by corrupting writing and acting styles so that many plays now are in fact sitcoms and dialogue just consists of one-liners. [www.britishtheatreguide.info]
I'm 66 and there are any number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what writing lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus – almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write. [The New York Times]
The music keeps going, the rhythm section keeps going, the piano keeps playing, the bass player keeps going, and someone stops playing and someone else plays. The actors are like that. They come forward, they play an instrument. Then something else happens. ... And you go away having felt the entire piece of music. You might remember one solo better than another, but the whole piece of music is what has stirred you. [American Voices]
I became very interested in the notion that an instrument like a cello might be another character, a kind of narrating musical personality. [Program notes for "after the quake"]
A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly rises out of the interplay of circumstance on temperament and temperament on circumstance, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
Character is not comedy, character is action: A character is what he or she will do. It's like the ball rolling down toward the tenpins, then all kinds of things will happen. But character is everything. And there's no character in a joke. [www.wgaeast.org]
All work is, in some measure, autobiographical. Even if you're writing about Martians, they'll have some of you in there. [www.wgaeast.org]
Writers don't only live once. They can live endlessly, doing retakes on marriages, on relationships, on all sorts of things. [www.wgaeast.org]
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance. [www.brainyquote.com]
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak? [www.brainyquote.com]
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all. [www.brainyquote.com]
Digression is good. It's usually what's most interesting in what people say. [www.tryst3.com] I like art that doesn’t simply congratulate the audience on their lives, but challenges some of their assumptions. [www.tryst3.com]
Plays exist in time, and tend not to weather different eras, except for say, Shakespeare. [www.tryst3.com]
I want to write plays that—no matter how they're dressed—engage my audiences in a pertinent, complicated, extended dialogue. I want to write something that some kid in Trussville, Ala., might pick up some day and read and think, "Hmm. How about that?" [www.dramaticpublishing.com]
I always write for a reason. I don't see the point of doing a play unless I take a chance and express an opinion about what it is I'm writing about. I try not to be didactic. I know I'm trying to get a point across, but I'm trying to do it in an artful and entertaining way. [Theatermania]
I do believe that when you’ve got this curse to write – or to be involved in some expression that is just fraught with disappointment, but there’s nothing you can do about it – it’s kind of like a virus. [American Theatre Magazine]
No matter how screwed up I was in my list, I still had something to offer in terms of the theatre. [American Theatre Magazine]
Growing up in the ghetto is unquestionably tough business. There's poverty and crime, the drugs, the intense hassles at home for lack of this or lack of that. But even in the most depressed areas, one can always find hopes and dreams. And as I began to write, I discovered that this is what I was interested in writing about—the hopes and dreams that somehow survive within the most trying conditions. [www.dramaticpublishing.com]
I think I've been a writer ever since I can remember, although, in practical terms, I didn't begin to write until the age of 27. But I do recall that even at a very early age, I saw everything as an observer. Even when hanging out on the streets, I felt a part of things but at the same time I also sensed this other part of me standing back and observing my friends. [www.dramaticpublishing.com]
In theater, where the use of more than one set is a sure sign of wanting to remain unproduced and where money is practically nonexistent for everyone, including the playwright (or maybe I should say, especially for the playwright), one writes for the dreams. [www.dramaticpublishing.com]
You have to make people aware how your material is specific and unique, what makes it special.
I'm addicted to the joy of anecdote, the structure, the way it makes life feel cozy and meaningful. [www.altx.com]
A playwright working in the long form must pick topics that fascinate as it can take years from initial thought to theatrical production. [Best of PlayGround 2007, Foreword]
A playwright should never be out of work as long as she has a pen and paper and a dream. [Best of PlayGround 2007, Foreword]
Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism. [London Independent]
Plays have a celebratory nature that no other form has. [Playwrights at Work]
What is withheld in love is always the most captivating thing. [www.seattleweekly.com]
Musical sound has physical properties that act on the body, and therefore the heart. The core of a person is, I think, accessed at a finer resolution by music. The combination of music and words can be an exquisitely physical experience for the listener. So if a story is told that way, a story can sink in pretty deep. [www.seattleweekly.com]
I wish there were more political plays. The problem with the American theater is it's not addressing what's going on. [The New York Times]
It’s got to be brutally honest. It’s like pornography. You know it when you are doing it and you know when you're bullshitting. You know when you're being self-conscious and contrived and forcing something to be there because you want to make sure that people get the point. You know when that's happening. But if you just really listen to yourself and to your characters, you don’t go for the easy stuff. [The Missouri Review]
I love my people’s history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors’ past. [www.newyorktimes.com]
I know what I’m trying to say, so I’m always open to learning how to say it. [www.newyorktimes.com]
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. [www.cybernation.com]
The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time. [www.vcu.edu]
You kind of have to go to these stupid places, sort of, to get back. [The New York Times]
There is an intensity, an extravagance, an abundant and unequivocal gratification to the vanity and the ego that can be satisfied more richly and more fully by success in the theatre than in any other calling. Like everything else about the theatre, its success is emphatic and immoderate. [Act One]
The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise. [www.quotes.zaadz.com]
In the first fifteen minutes of a play an audience is the most malleable group in the world. Give them the slightest token that they are going to be entertained or moved and they become a receptive instrument that both playwright and actors can play upon at will. Then a curious thing happens. Somehow at the end of that first fifteen minutes an invisible bell seems to ring in the theatre, and if the play has not captured them en masse, they become a disparate group of people who are never welded together again. [Act One]
The same word can be humble at one moment and arrogant the next. And a humble word can be transformed easily and imperceptibly into an arrogant one, whereas it is a difficult and protracted process to transform an arrogant word into one that is humble. [www.vaclavhavel.cz]
Content presents the task; form, the solution. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
I don’t think you start with a person. I think you start with the parts of many people. [Playwrights at Work]
Failure is faster in the theater. It is necessary that you not become frightened of failure. Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty. [Playwrights at Work]
I'm always happy to have written anything because it's kind of a mark of who you were at the time if it's even vaguely honest – though you could never redo it. [www.brainyquote.com]
I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness. [www.brainyquote.com]
That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you'll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed. [www.brainyquote.com]
And in spite of the fact that I had to change notes and leave some songs out, and all that business, it was a wonderful experience. It also taught me a wonderful lesson that I have always clung to through the years: to make the star comfortable. If you make the star comfortable, you’re gonna sound good. [www.robbierozelle.com]
That was a big lesson, that an idea is precise. I’ve been teaching graduate playwriting for years and the idea that you must have something to say is completely foreign to a great number of beginning playwrights. [In Their Own Words]
I’m actually disappointed if my collaborators don’t [suggest that some of my ideas are plain dumb]. For me, the worst thing is what can happen to friendships and/or working relationships if the collaboration doesn’t go as planned. [Fulton Theatre]
When you’re a playwright, people come up to you and say, ‘Do I have a story for you!’ Then they tell you some long-winded tale, and I find myself saying, ‘Well, that’s fascinating, but really all I write about is myself and my own musings.’ It’s a terrible admission to make, but my subject matter is what I’m going through and perceive around me. [Women Who Write Plays]
If I’ve just finished a big sprawling play, then I’ll do a claustrophobic one, then a sprawling one and then a claustrophobic one again. I think writers establish a chain of work that is always responding to itself in some way. But of course, the greatest joy would be to break that chain and start from scratch. [Women Who Write Plays]
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose. [www.brainyquote.com]
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. [www.whatquote.com]
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. [www.whatquote.com]
As a playwright, what I object to right now is any form of fundamentalism, whether it's nationalistic, religious or ethnic. . . . I think it is ridiculous -- and fundamentalist, by the way -- to say that I am not changed by the culture around me. [www.vcu.edu]
Basically, I think I'm looking for work which addresses contemporary social themes and deals with the fabric of the world we live in but does it with a certain theatricality. There was this whole thing called theatricalism in the seventies, and that term isn't really used that much anymore. It's the idea that this is something which can be done better on stage than on television or film. [www.nycplaywrights.org]
At least in my own work, I perceive it as a forum for a society to confront itself. In a good play that confrontation should be total, which means that it’s not only political, or spiritual, or intellectual, but combines all these elements. When you confront someone totally, you’re also confronting them on a emotional level. [In Their Own Words]
www.standingpoem.com ©2008 Cass Brayton |
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