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... and still more playwrights like to talk ... Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
I always proceed from the individual; the stage setting, the dramatic ensemble, all of that comes naturally and does not cause me any worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there’s nothing to prove and everything to imagine. [Playwrights at Work]
Dreams are reality at its most profound. [Playwrights at Work]
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality. [www.notable-quotes.com]
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them. [www.notable-quotes.com]
I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to have been a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world. [Playwrights at Work]
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality. [www.notable-quotes.com]
I've taught both screenwriting and playwriting, and playwriting is both much harder and much more rewarding. One can teach people how to tell a story in cinematic ways, but theater is a much more elusive craft. Each play is different from every other play in a way that every movie is not different from every other movie. Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well. [Columbia University News]
Comedy is like a line of coke, but drama is a really good meal with good wine and great conversation. You might even have changed your mind by the end of the evening. [www.nycplaywrights.org]
That a scene is within a book, or a picture, or in someone’s mind makes it no less “real” in terms of staging. The “real” point of view is a shifting one. [New Playwriting Strategies]
If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore. You've got a group of people memorizing every word you write. It may only be a handful of people, but these people know this thing maybe even better than I do, and that's what really helps. [www.sanfranciscoreader.com]
When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having, which is totally isolated, is like the characters' experience. To a certain extent, we want to be assured we're alive. [www.sanfranciscoreader.com]
Now if you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, your duty to work on it, you'll end up with some truth—not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. [www.sanfranciscoreader.com]
The truth is, I don’t do anything without music – it’s the one design element that I get. If I could go back and do everything over again, I would be a composer. And whether it’s with language or a well-constructed scene or a play itself, I’m always trying to write music to some extent. [American Theatre] You don’t want to write straight autobiography, so you put a flying robot in there to kind of disguise the fact. [American Theatre]
And the thing that's really resonated with me as I've gotten older is that people didn't have to look like me, or be my same gender or religious background or whatever, to be able to relate to the basic theme of what it means to have to overcome obstacles. Everybody struggles in some way. [www.broadway.com]
I don't find my plays depressing or lacking in hope. To create something beautiful about despair, or out of a feeling of despair, is for me the most hopeful, life-affirming thing a person can do. [In-Yer-Face Theatre]
I think the most important thing for Tectonic is this binary focus that we have. Whenever we do a play, we have two interests in mind: form and content. ... [W]e want form and content to copulate. We want the offspring of that copulation to be the play. We think about it in binary because we like to devote time to each one individually. [Theatre Topics, Vol.15,No.1]
Documentary form starts from the premise that there's a thing called The Facts, that you can present The Facts. And I don't believe that. I think that the moment you take one fact and pin it up against another, you're creating a narrative. [The Washington Post]
When I work with students, one of the main things I try to teach is how as a playwright, to observe your ego rather than writing from within it. [American Theatre]
Often, people use storytelling to try to communicate qualities about themselves – that they are clever, or compassionate, or funny. But an audience will always see the subconscious agenda. I try to teach students to make use of that dynamic. [American Theatre]
Memory is where lost history begins.
Screenwriting is primarily a narrative art -- and I don't think that's true of playwriting, which is dialogic and dialectic, and is fundamentally always more about an argument than it is about narrative progression. I suspect, in fact, that novel writing and screenwriting have more in common than playwriting has with either of the other forms. [www.salon.com]
We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch. We abuse people through words. We shred each other with what we say. [Weekly Wire]
This terrible emphasis that you had to be important is just as bad as if you have to write a blockbuster. One of the few tenets of playwriting that I absolutely believe in is that content determines all. Don't push it the other way. [American Drama]
People may think you have to find the answer, but what you need is to create the question. [Connecting Flights]
I'm not a fan of tour-de-force writing. I admire it, but it's not where my inclination is. I want to hide. [The New York Sun]
It was some of the best writing I ever did, but I cut it because it was drawing attention to itself. [The New York Sun]
What is different about playwriting is that you communicate through the spoken word, and it’s a very alive, living medium. Every night in the theater is different from the night before. There’s a real exchange between the audience and what’s going on onstage. [Milton Academy News]
When you write dialogue, you're trying to make it spontaneous and interesting and this, that, and the other; but you also must move the story forward, move the play, the situations forward. So it's not just ear. There's a lot of demand put on you because you can't indulge yourself; you've got to cut everything that does not move. [www.blackbird.vcu.edu]
The theater is not really a moral place. It’s not immoral; it’s amoral. And the best playwrights balance their characters. [Bomb Magazine]
Once you start working on something, if you don't find something you genuinely like, it won't turn out good. Even if you start out for mercenary motives, I have to find something I genuinely enjoy, or it feels kind of crappy. [www.indiewire.com]
I believe the scene has to have some value of its own and also move the story forward. Otherwise it's just exposition, and exposition is really boring. [www.indiewire.com]
I don't believe in being boring. It's not exactly that it's conversation, it's whether something new is happening or not. It has to happen in dialogue, 'cause you don't have that much else to do in a play. [www.indiewire.com]
A play is a poem standing up.
The theatres are full of deceiving sirens, garlanded with hothouse roses, and the public is content, and applauds dummy hearts and superficial dialogue; but the dramatic poet who wishes to save himself from oblivion must not forget the open fields with their wild roses, fields moistened by the dawn where peasants toil and the pigeon, wounded by a mysterious hunter, which is dying amongst the rushes with no one to hear its grief. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
I have learned to smell a rat when I read that 'politics and art do not mix.' Or rather, I have learned to smell a reactionary — someone opposed to any examination of the status quo. May we learn to see better than they do. [www.nycplaywrights.org]
My characters come from what I know of people, and my dialogue is my ongoing debate with my fellow beings. [Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly]
If you just forget magic and don’t try for it, mystical things occur. If you’re striving after it, you’re not in a receptive state and it eludes you. [Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly]
I take seriously the responsibility of working in a public artform. I want to match my view of the world against that of the audience and leave myself vulnerable to their acceptance or denial. [Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly]
If you're going to tell the audience the truth, make them laugh ... or they'll kill you! [www.masterplayworks.com]
The main difference between Shakespeare and Schiller is this: In Shakespeare the inner development is the main thing and the outer tragedy, i.e. the action, the event, occurs as a necessary consequence and at the same time as a symbolic externalization of the inner development, while in Schiller the opposite is the case. [The Playwright as Thinker]
Side by side with the necessary dialogue will you almost always find another dialogue that seems superfluous; but examine it carefully, and it will be borne home to you that this is the only one that the soul can listen to profoundly, for here alone is it the soul that is being addressed. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic—we are the dream makers of the society. [Writing in Restaurants]
We are driven into the theater by our need to express—our need to answer the questions of our lives—the questions of the time in which we live. [Writing in Restaurants]
The artist is the advance explorer of the societal consciousness. As such, many times his first reports are disbelieved. [Writing in Restaurants]
The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH — which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied — prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done. [Three Uses of the Knife]
In what business do you not have to drive your chickens to the market? (quoting Sir Nigel Hawthorn re. self promotion and publicity) [Toronto Globe and Mail, via www.masterplayworks.com]
When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that. [www.notable-quotes.com]
I think anything you put on stage is a great responsibility because you may have the power to move and change. You can get people marching in goose step. You’ve got to take complete responsibility for both the statements you make and the effect you have on a crowd. [In Their Own Words]
I wish there was a way for us to make a more generous, more supportive network out there. I think critics have a really hard job – I couldn’t do what they do. I’m personally curious to see if there’s something we can find out there that’s a balance between theater criticism and theater support. [Playwrights' Center Blog]
The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill. [www.thefreelibrary.com]
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young. [www.thefreelibrary.com]
We are all worthy subjects, and if I write lovingly and deeply about life today, then perhaps people in the future will see my work as a window to what it was like to live life today. [www.sdsu,edu]
Every play has different rules. [The Playwright's Voice]
There are so many rules about playwriting. I'd have a nervous breakdown if I followed them. [www.pubinfo.vcu.edu]
No one makes you write plays; the world could sort of get along without me turning out a play every year, so I do this because I enjoy it enormously. It gives me great pleasure, and working in the theatre is, I think its own reward. [www.nycplaywrights.org]
I’m an emotional writer, I’m not an intellectual writer. I believe we’re driven by feelings, and ideas are just rationalizations of those feelings. It all comes from our libido and our sense of our inadequacy. [The New York Times]
I started drifting into plays after reading Glengarry Glen Ross. I remember thinking: ‘All that swearing. I could do this. [The New York Times]
My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world. [www.charlesmee.org]
Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn’t influenced is never of any use. He’s the litmus paper of the arts. [Playwrights at Work]
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay. [www.saidwhat.co.uk]
I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program ... and not for any other reason than that there is no political program – any more than there is a theory of tragedy – which can encompass the complexities of real life. [www.notable-quotes.com]
I think it’s important to focus on a personal story. It’s about people. And to develop really strong characters because, otherwise, it can go too much into an issue-oriented or politically oriented story. [simonekeiran.wordpress.com]
I was just at a writer’s workshop this weekend, and the best advice I thought that was given by the presenters was when someone is critiquing your work, you shouldn’t just take the critique, but you should learn how they are doing it. [simonekeiran.wordpress.com]
I fell in love with playwriting because these voices that had been disregarded by my teachers, and by myself, suddenly became speakers. [Women Who Write Plays]
As a poet, too, you can combine English and Spanish to make language have a beautiful lyricism. It’s like making love to these people that nobody gives a damn about. [Women Who Write Plays]
www.standingpoem.com ©2008 Cass Brayton |
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