It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

• Tabatha Fortis
• You think I think an artist’s job is to speak the truth. An artist’s job is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention. If we’ve stumbled into truth we got lucky.
• The West Wing
  The U.S. Poet Laureate, Season 3 Episode 16 (60)
  Airdate Mar 27, 2002
  Teleplay by
  Aaron Sorkin

To me it was irrelevant that his [Cervantes] plays were not successful. One recognizes the passion for theatre that drives those of us who share it. A playwright has no problem identifying the techniques of theatre in the novel Don Quixote. There is the creation of living, breathing characters; the manufacture of a world better than the one we have been born to; the search for concise yet poetic expression of that world; the difficulties of realization which never measure so splendidly as the dimensions in one’s mind. And by all means include the love of applause, not from anonymous readers but from a living, breathing audience in the immediate presence of one’s creation. The affinity I felt with Cervantes is the same affinity common to all writers of theatre. We know each other, in the same moment in which we are ferociously competitive.

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 19.1 (1999): 125-30.

Dale Wasserman. Born Nov 2, 1914. Died Dec 21, 2008.

Note: Click on a photo to “Zoom” in on it.

…one of the most exciting things about being a writer is finding the life in different characters whom you don’t know at all. To a certain extent, you’ve got to let them live their own life. But there’s also a conflict constantly going on between you as the writer and them as the characters. Who’s in charge? There’s no easy answer to that. I suppose, finally, the author is in charge. Because, whether the character likes it or not, all I’ve got to do is take out my pen and do that (a gesture of erasure) and he’s lost a line. It may be one of his favourite lines of dialogue [laughter]. But I’ve got the pen in my hand.

“I’ve Written 29 Damn Plays. Isn’t that Enough?” by Michael Billington, The Guardian, Mar 14, 2006

Harold Printer: Born 10 Oct 1930. Died 24 Dec 2008.

Note: Click on a photo to “Zoom” in on it.

Note: Click on a photo to “Zoom” in on it.

Seems so long ago already, yet last week I was in NY to see relatives, a couple of shows, and eat a doughnut.

Okay, not just any doughnut. It was a Creme Brulee type of doughnut. It was worth the 4 mile walk to find it. It would be worth any walk. I could have forgone the theatre and just had the doughnut. *pulling myself together* The baker touts his natural ingredients, yada yada, all good stuff… The guy’s created an inspired take on Creme Brulee in doughnut form. The Tres Leches doughnut is pretty good, too.

On the way to the Doughnut Plant, we passed by 31 Cornelia Street in the Village. These days that location houses a restaurant, but 50 years ago it held the coffeehouse where the Off-Off-Broadway movement was born. It was at the Caffe Cino where the earliest work of Lanford Wilson, John Guare, Maria Irene Fornes, Tom Eyen — providing here only a few names of many wonderful dramatists — were first performed.

Earlier this year, a plaque commemorating the Caffe’s founder Joe Cino was posted at 31 Cornelia Street. It took us but a moment to find the plaque. It was moving to me, looking at the tiny, tiny space and to know here “artists brought theatre into the modern era.”