I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that. |
I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky. |
If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit. |
In grade school I did lip synch versions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. |
It's true, I don't like the real world. |
Maybe I have to radicalize that tendency to want to be at a certain emotional pitch, a certain psychological pitch, and simply sustain and repeat that particular esthetic effect. |
My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization. |
My rule for staging for the first six years, at least, was to make the staging be an ex-ray of the text. Try to be as simple, to do as little as possible, and only to do what was really indicated in the text. |
Now we speak in telegram form, we write little e-mails, and we have everything at our fingertips, so we don't train ourselves to keep anything inside. |
Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience. |
One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience. |
Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again. |
So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale. |
Then when I was fifteen, fourteen, a friend of mine and I from Scarsdale used to come into New York every Saturday to see a matinee on Broadway. |
There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life. |