1975 is as much a historical document as 1803.
I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?
Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.
The only riots were the people trying to get tickets.
The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.
I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.
Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play. It seems like spelling out mysterious, musical details can destroy a play by making the motivations too clear, too simplex.
Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.
I'm an American playwright. Tennessee Williams got in all our DNA.
You can't be a sort of pioneer.
We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.
I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.
Eugene O'Neil created an American theater, and Tennessee Williams taught it how to sing.
I think that some of these plays are lost in this new horror called development, which is a place for dramaturgs to say "let me tell you what your play means," and the life gets sucked out of a play.
People rewrite the play so much to make it palatable to the audience, to make something clear, that they just deaden it. Like it was left it in the oven too long.
Oh god, I'd just hate it if a certain dramaturg got a hold of a Pinter play, for example, which are all mystery and all music. That's how the life get's sucked out of plays.
Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.
There's no American playwright after 1945 who wasn't profoundly affected - who didn't have their DNA changed by Tennessee Williams.
And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.
However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.
Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.
People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.
The Atlantic Ocean was something then.
All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.
The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.
