Playwright Quotes - Page 9

• The director is responsible for interpreting the playwright's work through the cast with the help of the staff. It is the director's artistic concept of the play that the cast, staff, and crew work to obtain.

  Laurence Sterne

  Play, Theatre, Directors

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• The cast, staff, and crew of a live theater work together toward a common goal: a good performance. Thus, theater is necessarily a group effort. However, it is never a group effort of vague fellow committee members, but of associated autocrats-a playwright, a producer, a director, a stage manager, designers, and, above all, actors. Each accommodates the others, and may overlap others in function when necessary. But each autocrat assumes distinct responsibilities and accepts them completely.

  Laurence Sterne

  Responsibility, Goal, Effort

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• The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.

  Patti LuPone

  Giving, Actors, Messengers

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• In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

  Tracy Letts

  Decision, Boss, Lists

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• If modern design moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible, illusionistic world of Romanticism and Realism into a generalized, theatrical, and poetic realm in which the pictorial image functioned as an extension of the playwright's themes and structures (a metanarrative), then postmodern design is a dissonant reminder that no single point of view can predominate, even within a single image.

  Arnold Aronson

  Views, Design, World

  Arnold Aronson (2005). “Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography”, p.14, University of Michigan Press

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• One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.

  George Jean Nathan

  Men, Doe, Looks

  George Jean Nathan (1972). “The Critic and the Drama”, p.55, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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• I, too, am deeply concerned with an overarching idea that dramaturgs are now authors . . .. I am not taking the position that all dramaturgs own copyright, deserve special billing credit, or should receive remuneration akin to that of the playwright. I know from my ears at the Dramatists Guild that almost everyone a writer encounters has suggestions of how to write and rewrite the play or musical to make it work.

  Dana Rosemary Scallon

  Writing, Play, Ideas

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• Neil [Simon] was considered our greatest [living playwright] at the time [of their marriage]. Maybe he still is; I don't know. But anyway, he was hugely successful, and I just kind of got folded into that. And in some ways, he protected me, but in other ways, I wasn't fully able to step out, you know? He didn't want me to go away so much. The work that we did together was great, and I don't regret it, but what I am saying is that I didn't get an opportunity to explore some other areas that were offered to me early on. I took what I might call a U-turn.

  Marsha Mason

  Regret, Successful, Opportunity

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• A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.

  David Mamet

  Play, Two, Uber

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• One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

  Tony Kushner

  Jobs, Thinking, Things I Love

  "OSCARS Q&A: Tony Kushner". Interview with Mike Fleming Jr., deadline.com. December 16, 2012.

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• My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.

  Danny Glover

  Great Work, Backgrounds, Theatrical

  Source: progressive.org

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• I think I have a certain kind of style. I think at the same time, I'm aware that there's certain things that I did as a playwright in certain plays, and I try not to repeat myself, even though I have a certain kind of sensibility, and I tend to gravitate toward certain things.

  Nilo Cruz

  Thinking, Style, Trying

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• In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Spring, Thinking, Knitting

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• For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.

  Wole Soyinka

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• I was my class playwright and I wrote plays set in villages with kings and chiefs.My plays were about treason and betrayals. If they were influenced by Macbeth, they were also influenced by Nigerian plays I had seen and Village Headmaster, a television drama series I had watched as a child.

  Sefi Atta

  Kings, Children, Betrayal

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• The psychological detective story in "Equus" made Peter Shaffer's name as a playwright. But it was his next play, "Amadeus," that cemented his reputation, largely because of the movie version. Another battle of wills, it was the story of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seen through the eyes of lesser composer Antonio Salieri.

  Bob Mondello

  Eye, Play, Names

  "British Playwright Peter Shaffer, Who Wrote 'Equus,' Dies At 90". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. June 6, 2016.

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• There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.

  August Wilson

  Writing, Men, Who I Am

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• There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with philosophers and poets, or playwrights. We do not live in that moment, and the best way to gauge the proximity of an academic field to power is by salary.

  Elliott Colla

  Humanity, Salary, Gauges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the beginning this was just an idea. Then it was a short story. Then it was a script. Each step was pretty exciting to see people come on board to support the project. It's gratifying to know that more people are seeing my work in this form than my work as a playwright. And it's been fun to hear people's response to seeing it. I've been having some deep conversations with strangers and friends about how much it has made them think about slavery and its impact today.

  Steven C. Harper

  Fun, Thinking, Impact

  Source: www.nerdprobs.com

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• About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Years, People

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• I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.

  Adam Rapp

  Directors, Matter, Hats

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, "well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct".

  Adam Rapp

  Fighting, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.

  Edward Albee

  Numbers, Admire, Contemporary

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.54, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I think he [Vaclav Havel] probably would have liked to have written more plays. I think he missed being a playwright.I think he talked about wanting to write plays and keep appealing to people through that medium, rather than politics.

  Judy Woodruff

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.

  Edward Albee

  Feelings, Having Fun, Reservations

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.54, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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