All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language. |
As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional. |
Because at Yale, each year I was writing a play in a different style. Not that they demanded that, but I was searching as any young artist would be. |
Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits. |
But I also enjoyed the way more realistic, earthly events, like somebody peeking in the window, which you just happen to notice as the camera swings past, would redeem that film from being too much of a purist exercise. |
From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything. |
From the seventh through the twelfth grades, I probably designed and did a lot of the building for twenty or thirty productions. |
I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school. |
I feel confused about the influence of a computerized society, where there's instant gratification at every level. |
I like to think of the notebooks as a pool of raw material, ... I make plays of out it, so why can't other people? I just identify with this idea that I'm a funnel for this material that doesn't particularly belong to me. |
I make theater for myself, and if someone else can derive some value from it, fine. |
I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do. |
I used to go to theater a lot with my grandmother. She had a subscription to the Theater Guild; I used to go with her every Saturday afternoon. |
I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre. |
I wrote an outline. I wrote a rough draft. And then I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. And that's the way you were supposed to write plays. |