Theatre Quotations

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.
-- Eddie Izzard

the popularity of nutty, obscurantist theories about who wrote Shakespeare tells you that people equate his plays with enormities like the Ripper murders and JFK's assassination. That's what's wrong: Wonderful as they are, they're just plays. Somebody wrote them. It was Shakespeare. To say he couldn't have written them because he lacked an aristocrat's education and experience is stupid snobbery.
-- Michael Feingold in The Village Voice 11-26-2004

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.
-- Edward Albee

It was a witty little exchange, I must admit. It showed the mental acuity I would praise in a poetic text. But I admired only the studied application of wit, not its spontaneous erruptions.
Vivian Bearing in Wit by Margaret Edson

Let it stand, right down to the last pathetic cardboard helicopter. Broadway is over. Downtown, and the resident theater movement across the country, have drained away its vitality. We have a country, a life, a tradition and as much talent and training as the world can demand. Let us create the American theatre elsewhere, and make it great. It would have been nice to use these lovely old buildings for the purpose, but the realtors who own them want nothing human inside. Soon they will be condos and mall boutiques, and the real Broadway of the past a memory. All we have to do is create new memories to match it, and our place in history will be secure.
-- Michael Feingold Village Voice, July 6, 1999

Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that's what you are or were or are intended to be.
-- Tennesee Williams

I have written a couple of screenplays for studios, and each time has been less gratifying than the last. In my experience, they want no real representations of homosexuality, they want no complexity, they are terrified of ambiguity and unanswered questions -- they don't know what they want, except that they want to make lots of money. The only freedom I've ever had as an artist has been in the theatre...
-- Craig Lucas

You know, Hannah Arendt was always writing about the fact that the more involved you are in corruption or evil, and the more areas of your own existence there are that you therefore don't want to think about, or that you can't face, or that you have to lie about, the more distorted your perception of reality will be in general. In other words, we all have every reason to hide from reality, and it's a terrible problem. But I mean, frankly, when I write a play, in a way one of the things I guess I'm trying to do is precisely to bring myself up against some little bits of reality, and I'm trying to share that with an audience.
-- Wallace Shawn from My Dinner with Andre

Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory>.) It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.
-- Thorton Wilder

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.
-- Terrence McNally

Now Athol Fugard seemed to like hearing my stories, and also, he had just given up drinking so he was buying me drinks and kind of living vicariously through me. 'Spalding! I am going to have an orange and you will have yourself some beer. Now. What's been going on? Tell me all about your day.'
And I told him. I told him about the Perfect Moment in the Indian Ocean and he said, 'Spalding. The sea's a lovely lady when you play in her, but if you play with her she's a bitch.'
-- Spalding Gray from Swimming to Cambodia

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.
-- Suzan-Lori Parks

You should've seem him when old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of a phoney that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me.
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

In the theater, if they want to change 'and' to 'but,' they need your permission. It's in the Dramatists Guild contract. This is as close to heaven as any writer can hope to get.
-- Cynthia Heimel

Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky, and after that, all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before.
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

I was so excited to meet a person who wrote that troublingly and amusingly and sympathetically about Americans who didn't live in New York City that I bloodied my shins on my marble coffee table, trying to get to him so I could shake his hand.
Kurt Vonnegut, on meeting Tennessee Williams

As for my writing process, I generally follow the advice I give newer writers - 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.
-- Alice Childress

I don't necessarily think I'm going to write a women's play or a feminist play. I just think of a story I would like to tell, and whoever ends up being in the story, I'm grateful. People say 'are you feminist?' so I looked it up in a dictionary and it says that you believe that women should have equal rights with men. No I believe they should have less rights than men? Absolutely I'm a feminist, absolutely vehemently so.
-- Beth Henley

The most important thing, actually, is working with the director, with someone you share a vision with, because if you sit down for an initial conversation and you're not on the same wavelength, it's not going to change. It's not going to get any better, it can only go downhill from there.
-- Wendy Wasserstein

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 any more. It's the idea that this is something which can be done better onstage than on television or film.
-- David Henry Hwang

No one even remembers Arthur Miller's first play, Tennessee William's first play closed in Boston. Edward Albee was off-Broadway for ten years before he wrote Virginia Woolf. At the opening night of Virginia Woolf I remember that Abe Burrows came over to Edward and said 'Welcome to the theatre, young man.' I just wanted to puke. But that was the attitude - welcome to the real theatre.
-- Terrence McNally

We playwrights are supposed to think ahead a little bit and see trends. Even then it was getting clear to me that trouble was about to happen. The star system, the economics of the theatre, the desire of people who were putting on plays to make them safe and ersatz as film and television; all those forces were beginning to get deeply rooted. The fact that now they have completely taken over the commercial theatre in the United States is sad, but a lot of us saw it coming back in 1963.
-- Edward Albee

There's so many little pieces of domestic coolness. Everything seems so detached from what's happening in the world. But there is an audience that has been abandoned by just about everything else in public life. These people are still hungry for political dialogue, the people who know they still have something to learn - maybe we owe them something.
-- Jon Robin Baitz

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.
-- Craig Lucas

Growing up in South Africa - when I first started writing plays, nobody apart from my wife wanted to have anything to do with me or my plays. They were about subjects that were taboo. They involved bringing black people and white people together on the stage, which had actually not been done in the country before. So, if I hadn't decided to try and act and also direct, I don't think I would be talking to you today. I don't think any of my plays would have seen the light of day.
-- Athold Fugard

The only way to learn how to write plays is to see your plays done. And particularly to see them done in an environment where you're learning for yourself whether they work or not and determining the terms on which you consider whether they are effective or not.
-- Arthur Kopit

I enjoyed the time I was writing. It was a fun, creative time. No one expected anything from me. I wasn't being strategic in any way. I wasn't trying to set up myself as a writer. I wasn't trying to leverage into a new career. I just wanted to write for its own sake.
-- Margaret Edson

I was one of four writers interviewed about the play development process for a story in a trade publication. The others all said how development was hell and how horrible it was. I said it was fun, it was interesting, and I made a lot of friends. I loved the process. So, I was cut out of the article!
-- Margaret Edson

We are half the audience, but what's the percentage of produced women writers? Fifteen percent? It's dismal. How do we break the notion of quotas? Artistic directors put together their seasons with quotas, and it's one woman per season.
-- Paula Vogel

The greatest plot structure I've ever seen is in Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase. It is sheer genius. I keep saying to myself 'One of these days, I don't know when, I'm going to do a playwriting book,' but it would be an anti-playwriting playwriting book. 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?'
-- Paula Vogel

It is only natural for your sex to show resentment when their husbands contract another marriage. But your heart has now changed for the better. It took time, to be sure, but you have now seen the light of reason. That's the action of a wise woman.
Jason in Medea by Euripides.

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quauaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast...
Lucky in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett"

What has become of my past, when I was young, gay, and clever, when my dreams and thoughts were exquisite, when my present and my past were lighted up by hope? Why on the very threshold of life do we become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy?
Andrey in Three Sisters by Anton Chekov

Without a penny to his name, three great universities are begging for him, and from there the sky's the limit, because it's not what you do, Ben. It's who you know and the smile on your face! The whole wealth of Alaska passes over the lunch table at the Commodore Hotel, and that's the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!
Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

Look at these feathers and furs that she come here to preen herself in! What's this here? A solid-gold dress, I believe! And this one! What is these here? Fox-pieces! Genuine fox fur-pieces, a half a mile long! Where are your fox-pieces, Stella? Bushy snow-white ones, no less! Where are your white fox-pieces?
Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennesee Williams.

I was thirty my last birthday and haven't ever been married. I coulda been. Oh, yes, indeed, coulda been. But I don't want any and everybody. What I want with no-good piece-a nothin'? I'll never forget what the Reverend Martin Luther King said. 'I have a dream.' I liked him sayin' it 'cause truer words have never been spoke.
Tommy in Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress

Theater is so critical because it has always been able to release people from their isolation... The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright contructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is just the longings of one heart.
-- Marsha Norman

"Money! Money! - it's like the sun we walk under, it can kill or cure. - Mr. Vandergelder's money! Vandergelder's never tired of saying most of the people in the world are fools, and in a way he's right, isn't he? Himself, Irene, Cornelius, and myself! But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone. As for me, I've decided to live among them.
Dolly Levi in The Matchmakerby Thornton Wilder

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play, both on stage and screen, all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that great art can never be anything else.
George Bernard Shaw

Oh! if only I could go back to my flower basket! I should be independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I'm a slave now, for all my fine clothes.
Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

I know first-hand the devastating effects of censorship, so I wholeheartedly support Terrence McNally's right to speak without being subjected to threats and intimidation. Anyone who thinks his views are offensive has the right to say so - but they don't have the right to silence his voice.
Judy Blume

I find uncritical respect for most works by great thinkers of long ago unpleasant, because they almost all accepted as natural and ordinary the belief that females and minority races and the poor were on earth to be uncomplaining, hardworking, respectful, and loyal servants of white males, who did the important thinking and exercised leadership.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

You are the audience. I am the author. I outrank you!
-- Franz Liebkind in The Producers by Mel Brooks

A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
-- Robert Graves

An actor is a man with an infinite capacity for taking praise.
-- Michael Redgrave

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

In this piece of slick flimflam, there is attitude but no character, laughter but no insight, action but no plot, suffering but no pain. What we have here, in other words, is a Broadway hit.
-- New Yorker review of Tale of the Allergist's Wife 3/16/01";

The world's bursting with stories, the public loves them, but artists somehow feel embarrassed about telling them. In the theater, dramatic narrative has become the last taboo.
-- Michael Feingold in The Village Voice 4/10/01

Belonging to the Dramatists Guild Council where, with my fellow dramatists, I can directly affect (and protect) the professional lives of all American Playwrights has always made me feel that I am returning as much to the theatre as I withdraw. Because only playwrights can ensure the well-being of playwrights. No one else will do it for us.
-- Peter Stone";

I'm told that a few critics asked whether presenting my satire on the religious right in a theatre amounted to preaching to the converted. On the one hand that's a fair question ... On the other hand, I think it's a stupid question. If theatergoers may indeed be more liberal than, say, the people who voted again for Jesse Helms in North Carolina, what then is my option in order not to preach to the converted? Contact the Republican National Committee and say I have a play I want you to put on? Well, obviously that's not going to work. So is my option simply not to bring up topics that supposedly liberal theatergoers agree with?
-- Christopher Durang";

There's an insane desire... to find new playwrights, but you need talent to show there is more to life than misery, pain, and degradation.
-- Dominic Dromgoole";

I feel that if an audience leaves a play and they don't know which side I'm on, then the point of the play did not come across. Which is not to say that I'm telling them that they have to agree with me, but they should definitely know where I'm coming from. . . . I would rather make sure that my plays have a clear point of view than worry about them not being dramaturgically sound. I don't want to feel that literary handcuffs are keeping me from saying what I really need to say.
-- Kia Corthron";

Never despair but - if you do, work on in despair.
-- Robert Anderson

Writing is a tough job. Consider me. With my background, I can't get a play produced. I couldn't get Tea and Sympathy, I Never Sang for My Father, and You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running - my three most successful plays - produced.
-- Robert Anderson

It was a great struggle to get people to accept anything but kitchen-sink drama. My play didn't fit any categories. -- Arthur Miller on why his first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck failed in 1944.

There was this wonderful Broadway actress who was directing it, but she wasn't directing us at all!... About a week before opening it seemed to me that everyone was just jerking off, and being very indulgent, and I finally stood up and ragged us all out collectively, saying, 'People are going to come to watch this! They are going to give us three hours of their lives! We have to care whether we are boring or not!' Well, apparently the director didn't like this at all, and it was just downhill from there on out. 
- James Marsters on his experience at Julliard

For me, there's only one rule of playwriting: don't bore the audience.
-- David Ives

The Stage Manager isn't the leading role; there is no leading role - one of the lovely things about this play is every role is important. I love plays like that. -- Paul Newman, on his role in the 2002 production of OUR TOWN

Mostly you sat around the table and read your stuff, which is as it should be. There was certainly no theory of playwriting.
-- David Ives, on teaching methods at Yale University School of Drama

Q: If you lost your own soul, what's the first thing you'd do?
A: I'd go and kill Trent Lott. I would just rip through the entire House Judiciary Committee.
--James Marsters, who plays a vampire on the TV show Angel.

I sent it to every theater in the country and they all rejected it, except one...
--Margaret Edson, on the response by America's cultural gatekeepers to her Pulitzer Prize-winning play W;T

Only geniuses can tell you exactly what is wrong with a scene, though plenty of people can tell you that there is something wrong with it. So make a note of their dissatisfaction; but be very careful how you adopt their cure if they prescribe one. For instance, if they say a scene is too slow (meaning that it bores them), the remedy in nine cases out of ten is for the actors to go slower and bring out the meaning better by contrasts of tone and speed.
-- George Bernard Shaw

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive.
-- Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille (thanks to Felipe Ossa)

In the modern era it isn't enough to write; you must also be a Writer, and play your part as the protagonist in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic; the punishment dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity.
-- Tony Kushner, Afterwards to ANGELS IN AMERICA

Playwriting classes are good for getting over the terror of writing, for meeting other playwrights and other theater people, for getting started. I am not, however, a believer in advanced degrees in playwriting — I think post-graduate training for stage actors is necessary, but not for playwrights, who can and maybe should learn their craft by reading every play ever written, seeing lots of shows, and by being involved in theater production, in the rehearsal room, as an actor, stage manager, stage hand or assistant to a director; and of course playwrights learn by writing a lot, and finding actors to read their work out loud. I am adamantly opposed to undergraduates majoring in playwriting, acting, design or directing, or in any of the arts except perhaps dance and instrumental music (both of which require early rigorous training). Bachelor degrees should be acquired in the liberal arts and sciences, not in vocational training.
-- Tony Kushner, NYTimes, June 4, 2004

I was consoling myself the other day about the fact that I know John Simon is going to come to this play, and he detests me with a fury that is so fickle and hurtful. The only way I can really get through all that is that I remember him writing horrible things about some of the great actresses I've worked with, and I can only think that if this guy is so stupid as to write things like that about them, then I'm in good company. His criticism is always so ugly and personal on such a low level - like little things about the way people look. I don't understand producers who complain about him and then quote him in ads, because if you're going to believe somebody when they're right, you should believe them when they're wrong.
-- Carol Kane