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... and yet still more playwrights like to talk ...
To look for one clear motivation is the wrong way to go. [The New York Times] A theater audience wants to learn something — that's what I love about theater. [www.sfgate.com]
The requirements for the theater are pretty strict. You have to be able to find two hours of time in the life that you are talking about from which you can see the entire life. You have to find that critical moment around which the life balances, that sort of fulcrum of the life. And you have to be able to look all the way back to the beginning and look forward to the inevitable end. You have to know the whole story. [American Voices]
I believe that in all lives there is that moment when you can see why the person is the person they are—whether it’s a decision about something or an opportunity that’s missed or one that’s made to happen. I think that the theater requires that kind of dramatic moment from which all things are visible. [American Voices]
If you want to write a good play, write about the thing that frightens you most in the world. (Quoted by David Lindsay-Abaire) [www.goodmantheatre.org]
Crumbs from the Table of Joy started with an idea that then was accompanied by sort of a sound track. I imagined the mood and the tone and the texture of the period. Then from there I began filling in the characters. I listened to a lot of Thelonious Monk. That was my sound track. When I was stumped, blocked, I would throw him on and imagine the thing that he would do and where he would go. And it was always sort of unexpected. [Women Who Write Plays]
I think that once, as artists, we begin censoring ourselves, then we’ll see the collapse of American theater. I think that we have to continue to push the envelope. And cross those boundaries. Write about each other. I feel liberated that I can write about more than what I have experienced within my own four walls. [Women Who Write Plays]
To me what is called naturalism, or even realism isn’t enough. They usually show life at its meanest and commonest, as if life never had time for a dance, a laugh, or a song. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
The first thing I try to do is to make a play live: live as a part of life, and live in its own right as a work of drama. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
Life is a series of rebirths, year after year more difficult, never to be refused, but always to be worked with, coped with, understood, used and used by, never going back, but always moving ahead and higher. Which is what Beethoven did. Easy words to write, these! [www.sheilaomalley.com]
If you have any seriousness about being an artist of any kind, then you must know that there are people out there (and many of them are critics) who have contempt for artists, and have contempt for you even ATTEMPTING. Ignore these charlatans. Shut them out. They do not deserve to be listened to. They are every cautious voice from your childhood who tried to squelch you... Fuck THEM. [www.sheilaomalley.com]
Looked at from even the most practical standpoint of the practicing playwright, the mask is dramatic in itself, has always been dramatic in itself, is a proven weapon of attack. At its best, it is more subtly, imaginatively, suggestively dramatic than any actor’s face can ever be. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself . . . so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe. [www.notable-quotes.com]
Whenever I sit down to write, it is always with dread in my heart. [Playwriting: The Structure of Action]
I thinks theater should stick with what it and nothing else can provide: language, imagination, dream. [The Elements of Playwriting]
Once you lock in on a character then the character, or that part of your psyche, or that character who is a part of you, will dictate what it is about. And you just have to listen. [The Playwright's Voice]
The audience and the players are involved in this recreation of something that could have happened, didn’t happen, will happen, is happening right as they’re creating it. That’s why repetition makes sense to me. [The Playwright's Voice]
Right from the jump, ask yourself- “Why does this thing I'm writing have to be a play?” The words 'why,' 'have' and 'play' are key. If you don't have an answer then get out of town. No joke. The last thing American theatre needs is another lame play. [www.nycplaywrights.org]
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living. [www.whatquote.com]
I think what happens is that I write in a very high state of excitement and frustration. I follow what I see on the paper in front of me—one sentence after another. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an overall idea—the image that starts off doesn’t just engender what happens immediately, it engenders the possibility of an overall happening, which carries me through. [Playwrights at Work]
I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true. [www.whatquote.com]
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him. [www.whatquote.com]
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die. [www.whatquote.com]
The sad part is that when I work on a song for a long time I usually have to throw it away... I wrote about thirty-five songs for this show and the ones that are in it now are the ones I did during rehearsals. [Cole Porter]
Some of my contemporaries might not agree, but I don’t feel like there are any new stories. There are new characters, but the stories are really about the same issues human beings have always been struggling with. [American Theatre]
I read a lot of books on playwriting, and I guess they’re worth reading, but I think you just have to hang in there and peel away that stuff and let your inner impulse toward construction emerge. [In Their Own Words]
With playwriting, it’s pure. What you see is what it is, as opposed to it being manipulated or edited or reconfigured in a studio or computer. [American Theatre]
When there is something you know you want to do, and what you have to do, you cannot settle. I watch people doing jobs or doing things they didn’t want to do or did not believe. And believe me, you have to take care of certain responsibilities. You can't live hand to mouth. But if you have any possibility of saying ‘no,’ that is what you must do. Because ultimately, it takes away from your ultimate desire. [On The Set]
It’s only about what you believe in; it’s nothing else. [On The Set]
I was so intrigued by language and, more specifically, by the musicality of language. When I read a poem or a novel, I always see it as a kind of musical arrangement. [American Repertory Theatre]
I usually come up with a title first. [American Repertory Theatre]
People misuse language all the time, but that interests me. I delight in finding new ways of combining words. [American Repertory Theatre]
I’m not interested in small theater anymore. You can really ruin your life being a playwright; there’s a lot of struggle in it, so when I write, I want it to mean something, to have a large effect. I’ve actually said to students, "Listen, you better write something worth ruining your life over." [Bomb Magazine]
A lot of people say theater needs to be metaphoric or poetical – non-naturalistic – which I think is a mistake. You have to embrace the notion of theatricality, and there are many ways to do it, but for me theatrical means strong. [Bomb Magazine]
I only go so far as people want me to. It's very important to be funny: If you're not funny, you're a politician, and no one trusts politicians. [www.salon.com]
The word "work in progress" in my experience is sort of a disclaimer meant for people who are not up for criticism – i.e., this is not a finished product and it will become what it's meant to be at some point in the future. [www.salon.com]
I didn’t give a fuck about the rules of physics. [The Playwright’s Voice]
The plays have a kind of drumbeat: move forward, move forward, tell the next event. [The Playwright’s Voice]
Each play is a declaration of my right to speak and to be included, it’s sort of like throwing down a gauntlet. [The Playwright’s Voice]
So I think playwrights are really [messed] up people because we're really introverted and we want to be alone to write our play, and if we don't have solitude we're complaining about it. And then you have the time alone at your desk and you say, ‘Oh, I wish I could see people.’ [The Washington Post]
There's kind of a split between the roles people play and who they are in real life. [The Washington Post]
Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary. [www.whatquote.com]
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal. [www.whatquote.com]
In my work, after the Hispanic maid says that the dinner is served, the plot would focus on her life and stories instead of the family having dinner. I know what the family’s life is like. Please! [Bucks County Review]
By taking our dramatis personae and precipitating them, in the very first scene, into the highest pitch of their conflicts we turn to the well-known pattern of classic tragedy, which always seizes upon the action at the very moment it is headed for catastrophe. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
Theater and church are essentially the same thing. They are story-telling, they are inspirational, and they are true. Theatre brings an even higher truth sometimes. Church basically repeats the same old story over and over again. [bonusroundblog.blogspot.com]
The important thing is: the lyrics sit on the music. I think the music ultimately delivers the emotion.... The lyric has to sit on the music in such a way that it kind of rises and falls and flows with it so that if the music is going up into an emotional point, the content of the lyric and the words of the lyric are making that same emotional journey so that it’s one contour. [www.musicalschwartz.com]
Sometimes I use sort of lukewarm feelings I might have about someone or something and then I just make it really strong. I ask myself what if I really felt very intensely about this? [www.musicalschwartz.com]
I hardly read reviews. Or I read them after the production, because I'm curious, but I try and stay away from them unless people put them in right in front of me, because I think that even though I start off as a playwright wanting to create something that is very meaningful or looks at issues that are very hard or issues that I'm concerned with, by the time opening night comes around all I want is for people to like it. [www.canadianshakespeares.ca]
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it. [www.whatquote.com]
Language and movement are both based on breath. [The Playwright’s Voice]
I believe movement can finish a phrase of language. I have seen that happen on stage. [The Playwright’s Voice]
My life is both inevitable and surprising to me.
Take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. [www.quotationspage.com]
My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward. [www.vcu.edu]
Usually, things have come originally from my unconscious mind and then when I’ve worked on the play, I have perhaps seen that a line I’ve written has a purpose. But if I think about it from that point of view, it has not just one purpose but five and they’re all interwoven in a certain way. [In Their Own Words]
We hear all kinds of fascinating things every day, but dialogue has to create a life. It has to be self-sustaining. Conversation is definitely not dialogue. [Playwrights at Work]
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by. [www.brainyquote.com]
When something kicks in, I devote everything to it and write constantly until it’s finished. But to sit down every day and say, “I’m going to write, come hell or high water”—no, I could never do that. [Playwrights at Work]
To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. [www.whatquote.com]
We all need to laugh about the times we’re in, but we need to be able to cry about them, too. We also need to be able to be scared by them. And theater is a place where you can be scared, where you can grieve, it’s a place for fear, a place for mourning. [The Brooklyn Rail]
I think that’s what’s special about an artist, that they’re so unique that you’ve never seen anything like what they’ve done and through the uniqueness of another subjectivity, you further discover and discriminate your own unique perspective. [The Brooklyn Rail]
Theater is one of those places where that traumatic space is still alive—and the only place where it’s a communal event. [The Brooklyn Rail]
I start with a question and that stimulates other questions, and I think and think and think and think and I have a basic structural idea before I sit down to write. [The Playwright’s Voice]
There’s a big difference between the play you have to write and the play you want to write and you can feel it on the page. [The Playwright’s Voice]
No matter how funny lines are, they’re nothing more than funny lines if they do not push the play forward. It’s what happens to characters in the story that interests an audience more than anything. [Rewrites]
And one of the things that I try to do is to pull the rug out from under what they're laughing at. To have something else serious happen at that moment. [www.wgaeast.org]
For me, a lot of writing is about sound. A line, or a section, will sound out of tune to me if it's not working. It'll actually hurt my ears. And I always speak things as I write. My neighbors probably think I'm crazy. [www.magictheatre.org]
A play is both storytelling and a debate. Theatre allows people to hear live, unamplified voices, telling a story and debating – which is a rather rare event these days. It goes back to basic human rituals – the story around the campfire... the Greeks gathering to debate a question of morality. That is why I am a playwright and not a musician or composer. [www.magictheatre.org]
Changes take lifetimes, but in the moment when the artist has turned things upside down, maybe something has shaken out that helps you and the audience think differently. [The Playwright’s Voice]
I’ve tried to find times when people are talking about something that is extremely important to them, when they find their experience rips right through their linguistic organization so that the story is not about telling truth, good or bad, but is real. [The Playwright’s Voice]
It's my experience that when things are upside down, there is — an opening for a person like me. I mean, I think that — as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down. And so — people like politicians — are more trained to see it right side up, or at least to make us think that they're seeing it right side up. So from my upside down position, there's some things I can see. [www.pbs.org]
I don't think it's because, you know, you're necessarily gonna be jailed for saying the wrong thing. But — we all have a limited amount of time — you know, you have to have the courage that what you're spending your time on is going to be something which is going to allow you to engage with the very public that you want to meet. [www.pbs.org]
I used to begin with hearing the words, but more recently I use alchemical images to stimulate the imagination. [www.sfbaytimes.com]
Cherrie Moraga said this, and I found it to be true: What makes a play universal is its specificity. It's like when I go to see a play by August Wilson. I wasn't brought up with the blues, or in a household with August Wilson's characters, but I recognize these people, they're my people too. [www.metroactive.com]
You write a play about Day of the Dead, you write about death. You write a play about Christmas, you deal with the birth of Christ, although a lot of people do Frosty the Snowman stories. [www.metroactive.com]
To me, the best way to tell a story with any kind of meaning is to show somebody who goes against the values we all believe in. All my characters are fallen in some way. None of my characters are model citizens. [www.metroactive.com]
Probably the luckiest thing that can happen to a playwright is that your day job is other writing. [www.curtainup.com]
A play is not about chronicling the writer’s thought process. It’s about providing a narrative that allows the audience to create their own narrative experience of the story. [Women Who Write Plays]
I am quite aware of the contrast between how you assume things are one moment, and how they can utterly, irrevocably change in the next. [www.ic.sunysb.edu]
I am consistently interested in the conflict between how other people identify you and the more complex way in which you know yourself. [www.ic.sunysb.edu]
It's very hard to write a genuinely funny lyric. It's easy to write a clever one, and hard to write a funny one. The best way to do it, I think, is to be sure that the situation is funny to begin with. [www.sondheim.com]
The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well — work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece — suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience. [www.notable-quotes.com]
If you’re very lucky in show business, you win some, and you lose most. [The New York Times]
I wasn't really interested in myself as a source for my plays, though of course all plays have to originate with the author and, if you like, the plays expressed in part my temperament, in part my intellectual interests, and more than anything else I think they expressed the places where I found I could have fun. [www.bbc.co.uk]
When you take away everything plays think they're about, what's left is what all plays—all stories—are really about, and what they're really about is time. Events, things happening—Ophelia drowns! Camille coughs! Somebody has bought the cherry orchard!—are different manifestations of what governs the narratives we make up, just as it governs the narrative we live in: the unceasing ticktock of the universe. There is no stasis, not even in death, which turns into memory. [Vanity Fair]
And now looking back on the plays, I realise that from the play's point of view there's no difference between those passages which I invented or compressed and the ones which are faithful representations of a particular moment. The audience doesn't know the difference and there isn't any difference in that sense. [BBC]
I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's – there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is. [www.notable-quotes.com]
It seems to me that the psychological process is what interests people most today. Our inquisitive souls are no longer satisfied with seeing a thing happen; we must also know how it happens. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
The higher fantasy has a greater reality than this actuality. These banal accidents of existence are not essential life. My whole life is a dream. [The Playwright as Thinker]
The three strongest drives in human beings, are food, sex, and re-writing somebody else's musical. [www.theaterscene.net]
Writing for me is a way to explore emotions and ideas that in ordinary life I refuse to, or am unable to, articulate. [The New York Theatre Experience]
Every gesture embodies the whole self, including the history of that self. [Global Resonance Project]
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
www.standingpoem.com ©2008 Cass Brayton |
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