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... and, finally, yet still more playwrights who like to talk. Plot is not what is interesting to me about the theatre—it’s the theatre itself, that fact that we are all alive at the same time. And that anyone who comes to the theatre has an incredible amount of information in his or her head. [In Their Own Words]
Great art has never been timeless. Whether we consider Sophocles, Aristophanes, Dante, Shakespeare, Kleist, Büchner, Schiller, they all use “topical” problems, and try to give them an “eternal” interpretation. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
I believe that the artist should not prove a thesis but create examples. Art belongs among those rare spiritual means of stirring up buried instincts, of training brave attitudes, of deepening spontaneous feeling for humanity, freedom and beauty. [Playwrights on Playwriting]
Theatre’s the only medium that gives me the sheer beauty, power and presence of bodies. Ritual, literally. [In Their Own Words]
That strikes me as one of the blessings that the movies and television have done for the stage. They have taken plot to themselves. In its place, two other things seem to have become necessary—characters and mood. [I Am a Camera, Preface]
To finish any story, other than by death, is to lie about life. [I Am a Camera, Preface]
Consider every creative act as one of skillfully allowing something to pass through you. [The Playwright's Workbook]
In the first act set forth the case. In the second weave together the events in such wise that until the middle of the third act one may hardly guess the outcome. Always trick expectancy; and hence it may come to pass that something quite far from what is promised may be left to the understanding. [The Art of Dramatic Writing]
. . . passion and commitment and humanity, those are the things that get you to write seventeen drafts of a play. [www.vcu.edu]
If you know why you’re writing the play, the audience will know why they are watching the play. [The Playwright’s Voice]
As cultural animals, we do not forget because something is hidden, we forget because something is in our face and we don’t want to see it anymore. That’s what forgetting is. Forgetting is a way of not looking. [The Playwright’s Voice]
Every time I read a playwriting book, I think, “That sounds good,” but then I think, “Now, how do I break all the rules I just read?” [www.nycplaywrights.org]
For me, and I think for a lot of writers, writing isn’t some neat thing where you finish a play and go on. You go back and back and back. You put it aside, write something else, and return to it. It’s a layered process. [Women Who Write Plays]
I only write about things that directly impact my life. When I write, there's a pain that I have to reach, and a release I have to work toward for myself. So it's really a question of the particular emotional circumstance that I want to express, a character that appears, a moment in time, and then I write the play backwards. [www.vcu.edu]
When we’re scared to identify, when a protagonist shows a side of ourselves we don’t want to acknowledge, when we’re repulsed—that phenomenon is known as ‘negative empathy.’ [Women Who Write Plays]
Our lives are like soap operas. We can go for months and not tune in to them, then six months later we look in and the same stuff is going on. [www.history.enotes.com]
First and foremost, an audience wants to be connected . . . They connect emotionally. [www.canadiantheatre.com]
I want to make sure [productions of my plays] have a pulse. I don't want the intellectual approach to my work that I think is a big deal in Canadian theatre. [www.canadiantheatre.com]
Theater can be a space for what Alan Sinfield calls “cultural dissonance”: a place to disrupt the cultural amnesia that denies historical resonance and obscures interlocking oppressions, the foregrounding of which might help build a common ground of resistance. [Staging Gay Lives]
When a playwright gives an audience an answer, the story is, in a way, finished, closed down. [Staging Gay Lives]
I'd been reading Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year when the [1992 Los Angeles] riots broke out and I began to see them both — L.A. and the London plague — as the same event. A time of crisis. A time when rich and poor get thrown together — and, suddenly one sees alternatives. I began to think about what happens when the containment of a presumed danger through the regimentation of space breaks down, such as when South-Central L.A. began to invade Beverly Hills. [www.vcu.edu]
What’s interesting about plays is that ideas can come from them and go into the culture, and then they go into television or into film. [The Playwright’s Voice]
Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable. [www.thinkexist.com]
I used to talk about the theatre using a Melitta drip theory of culture. Things come first from the theatre because it’s an art form, and then it drips into the culture. So you’ll find gay plays first, then it’ll be Philadelphia, then In and Out. [The Playwright’s Voice]
Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits great propositions and their opposites, see how they work, and let them fight it out. [Marat/Sade]
A lot of the time, though, I write musically. I don’t see the words, I hear them. [In Their Own Words]
I’m not aware of the thing on the page, but as something that’s going to be up there in front of people. The page is just a distracting in-between step. My ear gives me a sense of when things have to be bigger, of the dynamic size of the piece. [In Their Own Words]
All you have to do is have someone dressed as a cardinal walk on stage and it’s drama. [New Playwriting Strategies]
What interests me more is interrogating the facts of my condition, interrogating contemporary reality as I see it, interrogating theatre itself. That might be subversive. [New Playwriting Strategies]
A play is as personal and individual a form of self-expression as a poem or a picture. [The Playwright as Thinker]
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it. [Playwrights at Work]
The supremacy of theatre derives from the fact that it is always “now” on the stage. [The Elements of Playwriting]
I think writing is continually a pursuit of a very evasive quarry, and you never quite catch it. [Memoirs]
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself. [www.notable-quotes.com]
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it. [www.whatquote.com]
There is something in that very history of travail and failure which precedes the coming to flower that adds to the ultimate sweetness of the flower when it has come. It is the difference between the natural and synthetic, sometimes very slight but always important. [Constructing a Play, Foreword]
Rules are good if only for the exhilarating sense of freedom with which the artist can sometimes finally afford to forget them. [Constructing a Play, Foreword]
When I sit down to write, I am sitting in the same chair that Ibsen sat in, that Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller sat in. I am confronted with the same problems of how to get a character onstage, how to shape the scenes to get maximum impact. I feel empowered by the chair. [Playwrights at Work]
I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life—her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter—are all worthy of art. [www.vcu.edu]
Often a writer is aware as he works that a certain critic is going to hate this one. ... You don't let what a critic might say worry you or alter your work; it might even add a spark to the gleeful process of creation. [www.vcu.edu]
I read a description of a play by Tennessee Williams that said he “takes common American speech and turns it into music.” I thought, “What a cool thing to do.” Dialogue should be logical, but it doesn't have to be banal. [www.enquirer.com]
One has to count on the fact that there will always be clueless, passionate people who, for whatever childhood mistake, are drawn to wanting to release their creativity in this art form. [The Playwright’s Voice]
I desire a mysterious art, always reminding and half-reminding those who understand it of dearly loved things, doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement, a complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture, not space-pervading like the intellect but a memory and a prophecy... [The Theory of the Modern Stage]
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead. [www.brainyquote.com]
You have to be an egomaniac to do art. Because you want to tell a story, and the story has to be something you really believe in. So you find yourself very compulsive, very passionate to tell the story in any way you can. And if you're honest and truthful enough and you show what these lives are like, the art takes on its own life, and you surrender it. [www.asiaarts.ucla.edu]
There’s a uniqueness to the theatre that I think is starting to nourish people’s need not to feel so isolated anymore, even though we’re more connected than ever. [American Theatre]
Text is not separate from image for me. ... I have a really strong faith and belief in the unconscious. Working this way doesn’t allow for much strategy. You pretty much have to let go, to get the hell out of the way of what is happening through you, almost in spite of you. You can’t self-censor, you can’t second-guess. There just is no time for that. The pressure is so intense it just cracks you open and you go with your secret, strange ideas, because you are desperate and don’t have time to think up any polite ones. In our work together, we have felt the palpable presence of something much larger than ourselves. It takes over – you just try and get out of the way. It arrives in the room. Everyone feels it. [McCarter Theatre Center]
Dramatic art, like all the arts, has before it an unlimited domain, without barriers of any kind to left or right. Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary of an art. [The Theory of the Modern Stage]
www.standingpoem.com ©2008 Cass Brayton |
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