Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

• Alice Childress
  October 12, 1920
  Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Simon Gray
  October 21, 1930
  Hayling Island, Hampshire, England
• Moss Hart
  October 24, 1904
  New York, New York, USA
• Adrian Mitchell
  October 24, 1932
  London, England
• John Arden
  October 26, 1930
  Barnsley, England
• Richard Sheridan
  October 30, 1751
  Dublin, Ireland

  Well, I never will join in the ridicule of a friend.

  Mrs. Candour, School for Scandal
  by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Wendy Wasserstein
October 18, 1950
Brooklyn, NY, USA

My plays start with a feeling.

The Art of Theatre No. 13, an interview with Wendy Wasserstein, Paris Review, Issue 142, Spring 1997.

Arthur Miller
October 17, 1915
New York, NY, USA

So we’re probably in an art that is — not dying. I don’t think it’s ever going to die because it’s so simple: all you need is a board and a man standing on it and a woman saying something interesting. You don’t need machines. But it is going to have to develop a different way of production. The problem is not that people can’t write plays anymore, the problem is that the audience’s relationship to the theater has simply dribbled away. And the playwright is nothing without his audience. He is one of the audience who happens to know how to speak. We are a kind of church. And if the parishioners are no longer interested in that church, you know what happens. It becomes a garage or a grocery store.

“Theatre,” by Arthur Miller
New York Times, Sunday, January 17, 1993

The 10th in our series of meditations for 2009:

Listen to the October 12 meditation: An Act of Joy

Want to know more about our OMCCB meditation? Read here.

Keep on creating your Art and Entertainment!

Harold Pinter
October 10, 1930
Hackney, East London, England

A blank page is both an exciting and a frightening thing. It’s what you start from. There follow two further periods in the progress of a play: the rehearsal period and the performance. A dramatist will absorb a great many things of value from an active and intense experience in the theatre, throughout these two periods. But finally, he is again left looking at the blank page. In that page is something or nothing. You don’t know until you’ve covered it. And there’s no guarantee that you will know then. But it always remains a chance worth taking.

The Echoing Silence, by Harold Pinter
The Guardian, Wednesday 31 December 2008

Please join us for the next One-Minute Creative Coffee Break Meditation Monday, October 12 2009 at 7:30PM PDT / 10:30 EDT.

Please sign-up to receive the teleconference instructions. It’s free and it’s only a minute long!

We’re wishing you an extraordinarily creative day!